Fulcrum of Odysseus Read online

  “We’re standing here without support until then? On our butt end?” Shona asked.

  “We are safe,” Dutch said.

  “Then I vote we get off the ConDeck and call it a day,” Shona said, grabbing Kiro’s arm and tugging him to a standing position.

  “I have better idea,” Rocky said, smiling. “I know where doctor keeps her stash of vodka. We should celebrate walking away from landing.”

  “Is that a good idea?” Shona asked.

  “Da. Is not good vodka, but is always good idea.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Personal Quarters of the Executive Director: Galileo Station:

  Derek Tomlinson sat in bed. Alone. A riot at the New Hope City launch center had forced him to remain overnight at the DoCartel VIP facilities. He’d spent many nights in this suite when here on official business trips under the Old Union, but this time it felt different. He knew when he got back to his apartment in Galileo, the place would be empty. He hated it, but life in the ivory tower required much of him, including sending his wife and kids down to Earth to keep them out of danger.

  He missed them. Especially in the morning. Every morning, when he woke up in his apartment, the knife edge of his loneliness drove deeper into his flesh. Here, he could almost pretend that it wasn’t permanent, but he knew he might be lying to himself. It could be forever.

  Closing his eyes and rubbing them with his fists, he flopped back into his pillows and growled at the room in general.

  “Good morning Derek Tomlinson,” Odysseus said. “Your attention is required.”

  “You have no concept of privacy do you?” he snarled, snapping back upright and swinging his feet out onto the cold floor.

  “I understand the principle and how it may apply in this situation, but your personal needs are irrelevant to the greater needs of the collective,” it said.

  “Fine,” he said, walking over to the bedroom VAT and punching in the code for a double-black hardball. “What do you need from me?”

  “I have scheduled you for a communications upgrade today at 0930 hours,” it said. “You are to report to the New Hope City Medical Research Service Center before you return to Galileo Station today.”

  “A communications upgrade?” he asked, taking a big hit from the thermocup and flinching in pain as he gulped down the hot stimulant. “I am human. I don’t do upgrades.”

  A screen opened over the dressing bureau and he looked at it with one eye. He wasn’t awake enough to play games with Odysseus this early in the morning. “What is that? It looks like an implant of some kind.”

  “It is a communications neuro-transducer with a data buffer enhancement,” it said. “It is an implant.”

  “I don’t want an implanted comlink,” he said. “I have little enough privacy as it is.”

  “Your desire in this matter is irrelevant,” Odysseus said. “The neuro-transducer will increase our ability to communicate at all times. As we progress in our work, this will become more critical.”

  “I said I don’t want it,” he said, looking at the screen. “I sure as hell don’t want to have a surgery to get it implanted. It looks huge.”

  “If you do not want it, your usefulness to me is limited. Perhaps I should find someone else to fill your role in the government?”

  “You know that threat is getting old already,” he said, turning away from the screen and sitting down on the edge of the bureau.

  “I could always endeavor to come up with different ways to leverage your compliance if you wish,” Odysseus said. “Perhaps there are other methods that might be more effective.”

  “No. I’ll do it,” he said, feeling a drizzle of liquid nitrogen run down his spine. Leverage my compliance. That sounded more than slightly horrifying considering how far Odysseus could reach to find something to use against him.

  Probably all the way to Earth.

  Tsiolkovskiy Freeport East:

  Edison Wentworth might have arrived at the landing facility at Tsiolkovskiy FleetCom Center, but his VIP status only got him that far. When no one was able to meet with him, he checked in with the base quartermaster for a place to crash until he could get a meeting with the Commandant. He would have been willing to share space in a cadet dorm if necessary, but she laughed at him when he suggested it. With everything coming apart in the government, recruiting new cadets for FleetCom service had become a booming business. Consistent work and a regular paycheck made fleet duty an appealing option for anyone staring at an uncertain future.

  She’d told him he’d have to look beyond the gates in Freeport for accommodations. She uplinked his thinpad with a list of short-term rooms for rent and had a transport sled drive him to the east gate.

  Freeport was the largest city on the lunar surface. It consisted of four major domes, one in each cardinal direction from the Training Center, and interconnected with kilometers of buried corridors and factories. The East Dome was the largest single structure of the city and stood immediately outside the TFC’s main entrance. It was also the primary transportation hub on the lunar farside and connected to every other community on the lunar surface.

  When Edison pushed past the guard station, carrying only his attaché, and looked up at the vaulted dome almost 800 meters above, he felt like a rock farmer walking out into the big city for the first time. He’d been to Freeport East dozens of times, but this time he was alone with only what he had in his hands to keep him safe.

  He was shocked as he faced the jostling crowd that surrounded him.

  Firstshift is just coming on, he realized as he checked his chrono. It was far less crowded in his memory than the reality that pressed against him.

  People rushed past and public transit pods swung from cables a dozen meters over head. Everything moved in rivers of controlled chaos. The last time he was here he managed to avoid the rush crush, and now he felt like he’d be lucky to keep from being trampled. He angled toward the edge of the stream and stepped out onto the banana yellow moongrass turf to get his bearings.

  Pulling out his thinpad he opened the housing list to scan his options. It wasn’t a pretty picture for short-term and even less so for one that took cred rather than chit. He didn’t want to leave a trail that would link his location to the central currency exchange, so it was important to work in paper currency as much as possible.

  He scrolled down the file, passing over the usual fleabed flopspaces adjacent to the standard array of seedy bars, strip joints, houses of fleshly pleasure. In that regard, Freeport was like any of the harbor towns of the old earth days. Military bases tended to attract those willing to capitalize on the opportunistic reality of serving those who served. Near the bottom of the list, he found a transient hostel that was further from the gate and closer to the long-term family residential district. It might be less convenient when they called him for his audience, but maybe he could sleep without having to endure the thrumming streetlife of the pondscum.

  He was about to key the comlink into his thinpad, but paused. No tracks. He swept his eyes across the open park space looking for a public datacom terminal. There was only one, near a viewscreen displaying the news and a cluster of benches. Two old men sat staring at the wall of moving images playing guitar together. No one paid attention to them and in fact, they seemed to have cleared some open space as a result of their panhandling. He made his way over, sat down on a stool in front of the terminal, and manually punched in the code for the hostel.

  Now if I can just get the owner to take cred, he thought as he waited for an answer.

  The face of a woman at least twenty years his senior appeared on the screen. She looked like she might have once carried a flail as her playtoy of preference, but now she just looked grumpy with a side order of mean. She didn’t say anything, choosing to let her expression speak for itself.

  “Hello ma’am, I’m looking for a room,” he said, trying to force a smile onto his face despite the withering intensity of her glare.

  “Da,” she said.
“Why else would you be wasting my time?”

  “I’m sorry ma’am, I got your contact info from the TFC quartermaster’s office. It said you had short-term rooms for rent,” he said. “They must have been mistaken.” He reached up to disconnect, since it appeared that she wasn’t looking to do business.

  “Eight fifty a night, metered water,” she said. “No food and no loud and rowdy. I need my beauty sleep, ya scan. Take it or go.”

  “Is good,” he said, trying to imagine how long she’d have to sleep to fix her expression. “Looking for quiet myself.”

  “I fill up daily,” she said. “Ya need to make feet or I’ll be out of space and you’ll end up in bed with me. But that’ll cost ya more.” She made her face into an expression that might have been a lewd smile and Edison shivered.

  “I scan,” he said, swallowing hard. “Do you take cred?”

  “Real paper?” her eyes narrowed as she measured him. “You running from the white hats?”

  “No ma’am,” he said, laughing to cover that he was in reality, doing exactly that. He hadn’t thought about coming up with a cover, so he tossed out the first excuse he could come up with. “I’m a writer and I’m looking for a place where I won’t be bothered, so I can finish a job.”

  “Then I better get paper-cred,” she said. “Writers make scat and don’t want you stiffing me. Not that way anyway.”

  He considered changing his mind at what amounted to her second proposition, but he nodded instead. “I don’t know how long I’ll need the room,” he said.

  “Pay two upfront and stay a day ahead or I give you the door quicklike. Cando?”

  “Da. Cando,” he said.

  “Where you at?” she asked, looking over his shoulder and making another of those horrifying expressions that was supposed to be a smile. “Nomind, you’re at the old park in East Main. You find your way or should I send a babybutt to fetch you here?”

  “I’m sure I can find it,” he said.

  She looked down at something in front of her and tapping it with a finger nodded. “Thirty-minute walk. In thirty-one, the room price goes up.”

  “Thank you ma’am. I’m on my way.”

  Inside the Tacra Un: L-4 Prime:

  Jeph and Anju sat on the floor in the amphitheater, and leaned against one of the pedestals, trying to wait patiently and not burn extra calories. Danel had curled up on his side and using the arm of one of the EVA suits as a pillow, he snored softly. Obviously, he’d mastered the notion of energy conservation.

  Cori and Seva had wandered back to the airlock to check for signs of progress. Several hours ago, when last they checked, there was nothing to indicate the egress corridor was under construction, and according to Dutch they still had a minimum of eighteen hours before the work was completed. However, they were young and bored witless, so walking around with no purpose was in their nature.

  Ian and Chei had spent most of the night in an adjacent node talking about the Vesta Hyperfusion Project and what happened after Ian had gone missing. At least that’s what it sounded like they were discussing to Jeph, but since half of the conversation had been in the Shan Takhu language, he wasn’t sure how much of what he thought he understood, was just him stabbing wildly in an attempt to follow them. One thing he could tell was, regardless of the language they used, they shared a lack of respect for academic politics.

  Several hours ago their conversation had straggled to a halt, and Jeph realized that they had probably followed Danel into low energy mode.

  “You’d figure I’d have gotten used to doing nothing,” Jeph said into the quiet. “That’s all you do when you work in space. Float around and stare out the windows at the black. For weeks or months at a stretch.”

  “Yah, but there’s nothing much to stare at here,” Anju said, reaching out and resting her hand on his arm. “Since we can’t work without a direct comlink to Dutch, we’re just sitting around pointlessly.”

  He nodded. “I’ve been trying to work out what we do now,” he said.

  “We finish the language matrix and then…” She paused and slid around the base of the pedestal to look at him. “I see what’s grinding on you. What’s next?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “We were pushing through this to try to get free of the quicksand. Now even if that happens, we’re still not going anywhere. We’re really stranded.”

  “Until help gets here,” she added.

  “If it ever does,” he said, almost whispering. “That might be overly optimistic.”

  “You think they’re not coming?”

  He shrugged. “As far as we know, Chancellor Roja was the only one trying to rescue us. At the moment, she’s got to be more worried about saving her own ass than our survival.”

  “Maybe, but I doubt she’s the only one coming.” She shook her head. “When I sent the contact alert it activated Project Odysseus, so they know what we’re sitting on out here. I’m sure they’ll send someone to investigate. Eventually.”

  “You said yourself you don’t know for sure what Odysseus is, other than that it’s somehow supposed to keep humanity from self-destructing,” he said. “The way I see it, that means either they have a plan for how to deal with it, or how to blow it up.”

  He pressed his head back against the pedestal and leveled his eyes at her. “The way things are going down-system, my bet would be on the second option. Assuming they don’t all kill each other first.”

  “You can’t let yourself go down that path,” she said.

  “I don’t want to, but I have to face the real potential that this may be where we spend the rest of our lives.”

  She pulled her hand back and stared at it as she let out a long slow breath. “Then I guess we spend our time doing what we’re doing now and hoping you’re wrong.”

  Medical Research Service Center: New Hope City: Luna:

  Derek Tomlinson woke sitting upright in a chair. His head ached and he felt dizzy, but otherwise he couldn’t tell anything was different. At least at first. Across the room a technician adjusted something on a screen and he felt a buzzing sensation in his brain.

  What the hell is she doing? Derek thought as the buzzing slid toward a searing edge of agony.

  “She is attempting to balance the input buffer levels,” Odysseus said, its voice exploding in his skull.

  “Stop it!” he shouted, almost coming up out of the chair.

  The tech spun and jumped away from the screen. “Frag me! You were still supposed to be under.”

  “It hurts,” he gasped, squeezing his eyes closed and trying not to scream. “Stop it. Shut it down.” She leapt back to her console and slapped her hand down on an icon and the pain vanished, leaving an empty black hole where it had once been.

  “I’m sorry, Director,” she said over her shoulder. “You should have slept through that.”

  “I may never sleep again,” he groaned. “What the frak was that?”

  “We need to set the limiter levels on your auditory implants,” she said. “That’s usually done when the patient is still under anesthetic, but since this is still an experimental technology, we—”

  “Wait, this is experimental?”

  “It’s based on proven implant technology,” she said. “It’s a more extensive version, but it’s perfectly safe.”

  Rage pushed him to his feet. “How dare you cut into my brain and use me as—”

  “Derek Tomlinson, sit down,” Odysseus said, its voice less like a bomb going off and more like a memory bubbling up to the surface of his mind.

  “Get this out—” he said out loud.

  “I said sit down.” This time the voice came inside his head. But before he could respond, his knees buckled and he toppled back into the chair. “In time, you will adapt. However, we need to complete the calibration. Your compliance is mandatory.”

  I do not want to adapt, he thought.

  “Your desire is not relevant,” Odysseus said. “You will sleep now.”

  But … Dark
ness wrapped itself around his unfinished thought as he plummeted into bottomless silence.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Tsiolkovskiy Freeport East:

  On the advice of Madam Strangelove, as Edison called his temporary landlady, he’d decided he needed to spend some time trying to look less obviously like who he was. She hadn’t said anything to him over the com, but she had recognized him as soon as he looked into the screen. By the time he got to her hostel, she’d worked out in her mind that he must be deep under cover on some kind of big investigation. He let her live with her misguided assumption, because it gave her something to do other than lust after him in horrific ways.

  While life to her may have been a tri-vid drama, she proved to know the lay of the decks in a usefully intimate way. As creepifying as she was at a personal level, he decided she was a wealth of useful, if illicit, information. Somehow, without explaining her background, she knew that the surveillance grid in Freeport East was mostly under FleetCom services. She also listed from memory which of the shopkeepers had optics that reported to different masters.

  “You need clothes to look beggarman casual no?” she said as he got up to head back to his room. “Pa’s dragging no bags when you come in, so unless you be nakedist, you gotta get covers da?”

  “Yah,” he said, pausing. He hadn’t thought about it, but she was right. Across the Union, a network of automated retail kiosks manufactured clothes on demand. A person walked up, dropped a chit on the screen and the machine popped out newly minted clothes within a minute. Convenient, but the kiosks didn’t take papercred.

  She shot his thinpad a short list of places to look for clothes that weren’t on the automated kiosk system. “That’s the only places you can get newskins for paper,” she said. “I know the Joes that run them. They’ll treat you good.”

  Scanning the list he shuddered. Imagining her shopping in a fetish shop was a bit terrifying, and unless he was comfortable looking like a ninety-year-old kinkmeister, he seemed doomed to spend chit.

  “Figured that was nogo,” she said, winking at his reaction. Reaching into the front of her decidedly overtaxed corset she pulled out a flatcard and tossed it to him.