The Cage of Zeus (3 page)

The two men waited for the top brass from the Mars Police Department and the Central Intelligence Bureau to gather in the meeting room. Once they’d arrived, Hasukawa and Prescott took their seats at the far end of the table.

“According to the communiqué from the agent we have on the inside, the Vessel of Life will attack Jupiter-I within a month,” said the director of the CIB. “We don’t have time to send in reinforcements from Earth or Mars. The threat will have to be put down by whatever personnel we already have at the space station. How many do we have stationed there right now?”

“Just the usual complement of twenty,” answered Prescott. “But there’s another team on a vessel headed there now to relieve the team stationed there. They’ll be able to work together to secure the space station. I’ll notify the commander of the relief team immediately.”

“That makes forty. Will it be enough?”

“The Vessel of Life may be an extremist group, but they don’t have the necessary cash flow to mobilize an army to Jupiter. Not to mention, that would require a large transportation vessel, increasing the risk of their being picked up on Jupiter-I’s omnidirectional warning system. It’s likely they’ll send in a small but elite team to carry out the attack, in which case they’ll try to come in on a cargo or research vessel. Our security teams are adequately equipped to neutralize the threat.”

The director nodded, satisfied. The members of the police department, on the other hand, were red-faced, choking back the words that came to mind. Why hadn’t they been alerted sooner? What the hell good was having someone on the inside? This last-minute warning limited their counterstrategy severely. What the hell had the CIB been doing?

“Who are the commanders in charge?” the director asked.

“The commander in charge of the first unit, the team on the space station, is Jeff Harding. Shogo Shirosaki commands the fifth unit, the relief team heading there now.”

“The composition of the teams?”

“All of the members of both teams are from Mars, although there’s some ethnic imbalance,” Prescott said.

“How do you mean?”

“Harding’s team has a good ethnic mix, but Shirosaki’s team is comprised mostly of Japanese members.”

“How did that happen?” asked the CIB director.

“With some recent transfers, the team just happened to stack up that way. But the members are quite used to working on a multiethnic team.”

“Any experience working with Harding’s team on a joint mission?”

“No, sir, but I believe both men are capable of executing the mission,” Prescott said. “Would you like to have a look at their files?”

“Please.”

Several hours later, Hasukawa compiled a report detailing the action to be taken.

He transmitted the information to Jupiter-I and the spaceship carrying Shogo Shirosaki’s twenty-member security team.

This was where Hasukawa’s job as an administrator ended.

After this, any amount of worrying was pointless. The voyage from Mars to Jupiter took several months. He would only receive reports and images, and whatever happened on Jupiter from here on out, Hasukawa would have no way to get a direct read of the situation.

Prescott had told him that he would not hesitate to use deadly force for the future of humanity. He was right, of course, but Prescott was only thinking in terms of the end result. Neither Hasukawa nor Prescott had ever been witness to any sort of bloodshed on the job. The only information that ever reached them came in the form of data and reports from which Hasukawa could sense nothing. Such reports contained only condensed fragments of the truth.

It would be Shirosaki and Harding in the field who would have to bear the burden of this mission.

II

1

THE FIRST THING
he sensed was the smell of summer grass. A pungent smell, as though someone had just finished cutting the grass only moments before.

A feeling not so much nostalgia as restlessness came over him. Shirosaki recalled the summers he had spent as a boy on Earth. The lush vegetation overflowing from the conservatory. The thick, sweet smell of overripened fruit tickling the nose like spices.

The memories came flooding back. The odd shape of a caterpillar wriggling between the leaves. Candy-colored ants marching up a tree single file. Butterflies with wings like metallic plates flitting around the orchids. Richly colored birds and the chattering of squirrels. The Summer Dome of his youth fraught with excitement.

In his daydream, Shirosaki was a boy of ten. Even as he remembered the Summer Dome at forty, his point of view was that of a small child.

When he was ten, the trees inside the conservatory looked to him like monsters lurching toward him with outstretched limbs.

The humid air was stifling.

The winding path was free of traffic. Unlike the energy inside the dome, a comfortable stillness pervaded the indoor area before dusk.

Shirosaki caught something moving out of the corner of his eye and stopped.

He worked his way through the brush to find a little girl standing atop a stone wall.

She looked to be about six or seven. She was standing precariously on her toes, reaching for a mango on a tree.

Shirosaki held his breath and looked on. The girl pulled the mango closer, branch and all, then twisted the yellow fruit off the branch.

The leaves rustled as the branch snapped back. The girl cuddled the fruit in her arms and caressed it tenderly. Shirosaki blushed as if she were caressing him.

The girl turned in his direction. Her black eyes growing wide, she jumped up like a spring-action doll.

“Do you like mangoes?” he blurted out.

The girl did not speak and stood stiffly on the stone wall. He approached the girl and quietly clambered up the wall so as not to scare her. He looked around to make sure no adults were about. He began to pick one fruit after the next and toss them into her arms. He continued to pluck the fruit from the branches until the girl’s face grew cloudy. “Stop, that’s enough.”

Looking down, he noticed the mountain of mangoes in the girl’s arms. He worried that he’d upset her, but she began to giggle. She giggled so hard it made him wonder what was so funny. He smiled sheepishly.

The girl pointed to a tree farther away. “Can you climb that tree?” she asked. “Can you get that one?” He said, “Sure, I can,” and jumped off the wall onto the path with the girl. The girl’s hand clasped naturally in his felt soft.

Suddenly Shirosaki was overcome with an aching sadness. He didn’t know whether he was feeling the ten-year-old’s intoxication or the sentimentality of a forty-year-old.

The scene began to waver as if the signal were breaking up. The picture grew hazy.

Shirosaki moaned, nauseated by the feeling of being torn away from the world. The smell of the vegetation and fruit quickly faded.

Shogo Shirosaki lay inside the hibernation chamber and winced.

His breathing was erratic. His heart raced. He wondered why the hibernation system had summoned this particular memory. Wasn’t it too sentimental to be used as a trigger to wake him? What was the point of rousing a space traveler’s nostalgia in this way?

A yellow ambient light illuminated the chamber.

Shirosaki steadied his breathing.

The real world smelled faintly of his body odor and sterilized fabric. The smell of summer grass from his dream faded like a vision.

Like a caterpillar, Shirosaki waited for the lid of the cocoon-shaped hibernation chamber to open automatically.

Hibernating mammals have a gene that produces a hibernation-peculiar protein—HP—in the body. Human DNA contains a similar type of gene. By raising the HP level in the blood, humans can fall into a hibernatory state.

The hibernation chamber maintained a passenger’s life functions during deep sleep. Required aboard all vessels capable of long-term trips, the system greatly reduced the amount of food and oxygen supplies needed for interplanetary voyages.

As the scheduled passenger-waking day approached, the system injected the passenger with a shot to lower the HP level in the blood, stimulating the brain into wakefulness. This triggered a memory, facilitating the transition into the waking state. Although in Shirosaki’s case, it was not a terribly pleasant way to wake up.

The lid opened, and Shirosaki sat up in the chamber.

He grabbed hold of the edge with both hands and propelled himself out of the chamber with his arms and legs.

The gravity onboard was maintained at zero so passengers wouldn’t feel the strain of locomotion after months of sleep.

After passengers underwent about a week of rehabilitation to work the muscles back to their original strength, the gravity onboard was adjusted to 0.3 G, the same gravity as on Mars. Since all of the passengers on his voyage were from Mars, maintaining a 1.0 G environment wasn’t necessary.

Shirosaki was a field officer of an antiterror unit assigned to the Special Security Division of the Mars Police Department. Though his usual duties entailed maintaining security on Mars, his team was occasionally loaned out for special extramartian missions. The security details on Asteroid City and on Jupiter-I were part of teleplanetary duty rotation for his team.

Since none of the hibernation chambers containing the other members were open, Shirosaki checked the control panel. The display indicated he was the only one to have regained wakefulness.

Maybe he had received an emergency message for his eyes only.

Shirosaki slid into the seat in front of the terminal and activated the communications system. He entered his ID number to access the unread messages. There were two. One was a private transmission; the other contained orders addressed to the entire team.

He opened the private transmission. The face of Special Security Division Captain Hasukawa appeared onscreen.

“By the time you receive this transmission, you will be a week out of Jupiter-I. How are you feeling, Commander? I trust the hibernation chamber awakened you with a pleasant dream?”

Hasukawa smiled amiably as if he were seeing the man he was addressing.

“Yeah, thanks,” Shirosaki muttered.

Although Hasukawa belonged to the Special Security Division, someone of his rank was rarely seen in the field. He would never make an appearance in the field on Mars, much less during a teleplanetary assignment. The figure of Hasukawa in a suit, leaning back in his chair, resembled a corporate manager more than a security officer. While Shirosaki certainly wasn’t envious, he was made to realize the gulf between his home on Mars and his current location all the more.

“There’s been a change of plans. Rather than relieving the security team stationed on Jupiter-I, you’ll be joining their team to guard the space station. The security detail on the space station is being doubled. Do you understand what that means?”

Shirosaki felt his entire body tense.

Hasukawa continued:

“We received a communiqué from a CIB operative that terrorists are planning an attack on Jupiter-I. Find them and neutralize the threat. No arrests. Take every last one of them out.”

Shirosaki knitted his brows. He was a member of the special security unit, not the military. While he had the authority to kill in extreme cases, wouldn’t it be more prudent to make an arrest and try to extract more information about the group they were dealing with?

“The terrorists call themselves the Vessel of Life. We believe they’re targeting the research facilities and the special district on Jupiter-I. We won’t get anywhere negotiating with them or learn anything by making an arrest. Your orders are to eliminate them.”

Hasukawa leaned forward and seemed to look Shirosaki directly in the eye.

“They’re spending a pretty penny to get to Jupiter, so they must believe they have a chance of succeeding. They shouldn’t pose too big of a threat considering their numbers, but be careful. Don’t let your guard down.”

Shirosaki closed the message file and let out a sigh.

He recalled what a colleague had told him before he left Mars.

You can look at the blue of the earth all you want and there’s no harm in it. Whether you were born on the Moon or Mars, even if Earth is not your home planet, that blueness has the power to heal. There’s no explaining why. It arouses something instinctual in humans. It’s not exactly nostalgia but a kind of relief—that there is water on that planet—that soothes people’s souls. But you better not look too long at the face of Jupiter. You’ll go crazy if you stare at the Great Red Spot for too long. It’s the eye of God, the eye of Zeus—the eye of a supreme being sending us a warning, trying to break the will of humanity from venturing out into deep space.

Being stationed on Jupiter-I had made Shirosaki’s colleague ill. Unable to bear the idle days in the space station where nothing ever happened, the officer broke down before his assignment had ended.

As he stared at the Great Red Spot to help pass the time, he had become possessed by the eye of Jupiter.

The Great Red Spot was an enormous cloud swirling in Jupiter’s atmosphere consisting of hydrogen and helium. The vortex was elliptical, measuring twelve thousand kilometers at its minor axis and twenty-five thousand kilometers at its major axis, making it large enough to consume two Earths. If you stared at it long enough, it might very well drive you mad.

The size of Jupiter, to someone only familiar with Earth, the Moon, and Mars, was an imposing sight. The equatorial diameter of Jupiter was 142,984 kilometers; you could lay eleven planets the size of Earth on it from end to end.

Jupiter. The planet named for the Roman version of the great god Zeus. This planet, shrouded in gasses and comprised of a rock core said to be about fifteen times the mass of Earth, completed one rotation in an astounding 9.925 hours, and ever threatened to swallow the space station and its residents with its sinister eye.

Unless you were fascinated by astronomy, the scale of Jupiter was usually a source of stress for humans—a species just starting to venture out into deep space.

In addition, Jupiter produced an intense magnetic field and radiation waves. The magnetic field expanded to trap sixty-three satellites into its orbit and was twenty thousand times the intensity of Earth’s. The magnetic field contained high-energy particles, which emitted strong radio waves. One of Jupiter’s satellites, Io, continued to be the most geologically active in the solar system. Its volcanoes dispersed sulfur and other chemical substances into space, triggering electrical discharges of three million amps. This created a storm around Jupiter’s atmosphere, triggering an enormous aurora at Jupiter’s polar regions that could cover the span of three Earths.

Were it not for the powerful defense mechanisms protecting spacecraft and the station, humans would die instantly in such an unforgiving environment. Without the medicines and metabolic molec machines to periodically restore their cells and DNA, humans would surely have a shorter life expectancy in the Jovian system.

Shirosaki was also required to undergo this restoration treatment. The same went for the staff living on the three stations near Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. They were just barely able to survive, sufficiently shielded by all sorts of defensive measures and receiving the necessary preventative medicine.

In the Jovian system, humans were like bacteria clinging to the tiniest puddle of moisture. But these bacteria had both skill and smarts. They were gradually expanding their habitat into the depths of space. While they were only able to reach Jupiter now, surely they would eventually see what was beyond the solar system.

Shirosaki’s colleague had an outstanding service record on Mars. He had prided himself in running headfirst into danger. He was a hero who’d captured and disposed of countless terrorists and succeeded in carrying out death-defying rescue operations. He had thrived on defeating the enemy. But when he transferred to the security detail on Jupiter-I in the twilight of his career, he began to erode like a sand castle on the shore.

Perhaps the toll of his aggressive approach to the job had finally caught up to him on Jupiter-I. He returned to Mars and immediately submitted his resignation. The man was forty-five. With a wife and kids. Now he had a sedentary job watching surveillance cameras in an office building in Cryse City.

What about himself, Shirosaki wondered. Idle days on Jupiter-I. A security detail where nothing happened. Fine by him. As a matter of fact, he’d been looking for just that kind of place.

Shirosaki had taken the job because the rotating assignment would eventually come around to him sooner or later. He was also becoming less enamored with going out in the field. He was growing tired of the routine of going in, taking control of the scene, and taking down the enemy. Since he’d chosen this job as his profession, he had no problem with going in to neutralize a threat with guns blazing. But the job did little more than treat the symptom. Unless society underwent some sort of drastic change, terrorism would continue to exist. It frustrated him to know that what was plainly obvious to everyone couldn’t be accomplished without the right people and government departments working to effect that change.

They were only stalling for time. Unless something happened to transform society, the job would continue without end. But Shirosaki had misplaced his priorities.

He had hoped going to Jupiter would offer him some relief. He knew he was running away. But he was also aware that running would be the best medicine for him now. Cushy assignment or not, he was still going to get paid. At forty, Shirosaki had a wife and child to look after, and without any commendations to speak of, he couldn’t very well resign. The Jupiter assignment was a godsend even if it meant spending months apart from his family.

Of course, that had all been dependent on nothing happening on Jupiter-I. It was a moot point now that he was likely to see action there.