Jupiter Three

My apologies for not posting over the last several days.

I have been in the brig.

I’ll back up. I’ve lost track of time so bear with me.

Last Wednesday was my day off. Jay had pulled some strings so that I could run through some system checks for him in the shuttle bay, unescorted. I was surprised that CS would allow it, given the bomb scare earlier in the flight, but when I showed up Wednesday afternoon, the guard at the door confirmed I was in the system, and let me on through.

I know I am repeating myself, but you can’t understand what its like for a grounded pilot to be in a bay this large, with so many ships. It was freedom. I clipped my harness to the guide line and tested my magnetic booties (now that Jay had shared with me the proper procedure for not being propelled across the bay!), and headed to the ship I was assigned to inspect.

It was a smaller shuttle than the frigate Jay had run through with me; one I was familiar with. I had flown one like it for about three months, flying big wigs between Mars and terrestrial ships when they arrived. This model had room for three passengers and some luggage, and that was about it. It was sleek, since it had to do double duty as an atmospheric shuttle as well, and had extra thrusters for balance. All in all, a sweet ride. I wished I could take it out, but had to settled for sitting in the pilots chair.

It took me about 20 minutes to run through pre-flight, since they wanted complete diagnostics run, and I was just finishing up the visual inspection when I was approached by security. This was someone I hadn’t seen before; I should have suspected it was one of Johns’ goons right away just by the attitude.

“You have authorization to be on the bay?” he asked with just a hint of arrogance.

“I do – how do you think I got in here?” I snapped back, having been startled by his approach.

“Let me see your id,” he sighed, as if this sort of thing happened all the time, just to annoy him personally. I handed him my ID card and he scanned it into his hand held. “Can you follow me please.” He said it as a statement rather than a question. I locked up the tools I had gotten out and followed him back to the inner airlock.

“What’s the problem? I have authorization; I’m substituting for Jay Brothers. The guard at the checkpoint said I checked out.”

“Just follow me, Crewman Ryan.”

My apology for disappearing in the middle of a story. Lisa had me working extra shifts at the Messa Mesa. I think she is pissed at having to bail me out. Where was I?

I was following Gorgon the Barbarian out of the shuttle bay.

Riding back to the wheel, I sat on one of the benches in the elevator. The ride can be very disorienting as you transition from a weightless environment to progressive gravity the further toward the rim one approaches . My friend from CS chose to stand stoically, staring straight ahead. I don’t know what he was trying to prove.

We arrived at level two, and I was escorted to a briefing room and instructed to sit. Gorgon left, and I sat trying to figure out what was going on. When Johns walked in with another goon 30 minutes later, my eyes rolled. Of course.

“Lieutenant, so good to see you again. How’s your head bashing arm? Elbow OK?”

She smiled, a predatory smile. “Hello Ryan, I understand you’ve been trespassing in unauthorized areas of the ship? You do know that shuttle bay access is restricted to pilots and mechanics. Matter of security. Second rate short order cooks definitely do not qualify as pilots OR mechanics.”

I ignored the shot at my cooking skills. My food speaks for itself. I don’t know what it says. I don’t speak vegetable.

“Now Lieutenant, I think we both know I was down there with approval. It’s in the system.”

Johns looked artificially confused. “We’ve searched all through the computer system; I’m afraid there is no record of you being authorized for shuttle duty.”

She messed with the system? “Those damn computer systems. Buggy as hell. Check the video record – you’ll see the guard checking the system and letting me through.”

“Funny about that,” she replied. “There is no image in the video record for that time period. We’ve had problems in the past with missing images. We know a few people who have interfered with them in the past; something to do with deflector belts, but we haven’t found a work around yet,” she finished with a grin. “The guard on duty has no recollection of you passing through.”

“Wow, that’s poor “guardmanship”, since I obviously got to the shuttle bay. Check with Jay Brothers; he’s the pilot who let me cover his shift. He’ll vouch for me.”

“Crewman Brothers? ” she looked at the goon. “Didn’t we have Crewman Brothers in for questioning about illegal spirits distribution a couple of days ago?”

“Yes ma’am. I believe we were able to negotiate an agreement that would keep the incident off his record.”

“Yes, I remember that now.”

I just smiled. I knew I was screwed.

“What is it you want from me Lieutenant? Where is all this going?”

She nodded at the goon, who exited the room, leaving only myself and Johns.

As soon as Johns turned her attention back to me, I was up out of my seat. Before she could react I grabbed her arm and twisted. In a split second I had her in a wrist lock. She started to call out, but a quick kick to her solar plexus left her gasping for breathe.

I counted on the camera in the interrogation room being disabled. I knew John’s style now; she was brutish and sloppy. Letting me get the drop on her like that confirmed for me that her advancement in Colonial Security was driven by mommy, and not by any great achievement on her part.

“Lieutenant, I am tired of your little games. Mommy is not here to get you out of hot water any more, and I am sure that even the brutes you’ve collected around you are getting bored with this game.” She tried to rise, so I twisted her wrist to keep her on her knees.

“We are watching you, just like you are watching us,” I lied. I decided to push the lie further. “We anticipated your little game, and I had my tech people monitor the system while I was down in the shuttle bay. By now the video deletion has your cyber prints all over it.

She started to speak, but a twist to her arm turned it into a squeal. “I’m not done talking. The games stop now. The harassment of my friends stops now. whatever problem you have with me, get over it. I’m not worth the trouble, and your certainly not worth mine.”

I finished with another kick to her abdomen, leaving her breathless on the floor. I released her wrist, and moved towards the door. I knocked, to bring the goon back into the room. As he opened the door he would have seen two things simultaneously, had his brain been able to process that fast. The first was John’s crumpled form; the second was the door swinging towards his face.

Before he realized what had happened, I grabbed behind his neck and pulled him into my rising knee, forcing his breathless body into the room with Johns.

I closed the door behind me, strolling back towards the elevator. The doors slid open, and I punched the button for level four. Made it to level three before the elevator alarm rang and the the car stopped. It opened back up on level two, where I was met by four men from Colonial Security.

Damn.

The cells on the Jupiter Three have padded walls. Whoever planned the brig allowed for the need to incarcerate someone having a break down. There are four cells (unless there is a second brig somewhere else), and they can hold at most 2 people. Except for me, all the cells were empty.

The four Colonial Security officers who had escorted me from the elevator to the brig never said a word. Neither did I. I glanced down the hall to the interrogation room to see Johns helping her goon to the infirmary. I smiled to myself. It wasn’t a total loss.

The first thing that concerned me was when two of the four officers walked me to a cell without processing me first. This was a space ship right? You can’t make people disappear on a space ship; can you? How much power did Johns really have? A beating, a couple of days in the infirmary, and then the cycle of harassment could start again. Shoot, we could go at least, what, twelve rounds before we reached Jupiter. And imagine the fun we could have once the colony started up.

These were the thoughts that had been going through my mind for three, maybe four hours. There’s no clock in the cells. Not a word from anyone– no interrogation, no list of charges.

Imagine my shock when Janice Alexander, not Rebecca Johns, walked into my cell.

“Hello, Ryan.”

“When did you start working as Johns bulldog, Lieutenant?” I asked Alexander.

I added just a hint of sarcasm. It’s my forte. Sarcasm is an art form – an unappreciated art form – but an art form none the less. I consider myself an artist.

“Rebecca Johns doesn’t even know your here, Ryan,” she replied.

“Okaaay,” I started, “then what is this about? Because if its about the shuttle bay, I was framed. I was just down there…”

“We already know about the shuttle bay,” she interrupted, waving off my concern. “After the last little incident with the main frame we’ve put in some extra safe guards; alerts to warn us when someone tries to alter data. We know one of Johns allies in tech deleted the authorizations, or at least thinks he did. That’s how we knew where you were. As soon as we saw that you had been picked up, we monitored the interrogation room.”

“I assumed Johns had turned off the video,” I replied.

“She had. We turned it back on. Personally, I would have liked to have seen how far should would take this, but you surprised her before I could find out.” She smiled. “Ypou move pretty fast when you want to.”

I ignored her assessment of my defense skills. “So this,” I waved my hands around the cell, “IS about that bitch Johns?”

“No Ryan, this is about bombs.”

It took me a few seconds to connect the dots on that comment. “Oh, come on Janice, you couldn’t possibly think that I had anything to do with the bomb in the lab.”

She smiled. “No, and more importantly, neither do my superiors.”

“Well then WHAT THE HELL AM I IN HERE FOR!” I shouted.

She looked calmly into my eyes, and said, without a hint of sarcasm, “Because I need your help.”

“The bomb we found in the science lab was very sophisticated,” Alexander started. “However, there is no way someone could have gotten on board with it before commencement. Colonial Security both here and on Earth anticipated possible attacks on either of both ships. Our equipment would have picked it up.”

“Why would someone want to blow up the colony ships? My god, there are over 500 people on each one.”

“There are a lot of possible reasons. Some political groups don’t want the colony to succeed. Religious groups afraid of losing power, corporations afraid of losing monopolies, the list goes on. The point is, we were extra careful to watch anything that was brought on board.”

“OK, but something did get on board.”

“No, something was built on board. Built from materials already on the ship, materials assumed intended for other purposes; mining fuses, sensor arrays, communications equipment.”

“That means someone still on board built the bomb.”

“Correct.” She paused, as if to decide how much more I needed to know. “We think both bombs were intended to go off at the same time. Take out the science labs on both ships after commencement of the JupiterThree, but before either ship reached the Jovian system. Something went wrong on the TerraStar though.”

I waited with interest.

“The bomb went off early, we think as the bomber was planting it.”

“So one of the victims,” I started…

“…may have been one of our bombers,” she finished.

“And the bomber here?”

“We haven’t been able to discover who that is, or even how many their might be. When you and your friends pulled your little stunt stealing the holo vid it put you and your friend Carl at the top of our list; we were especially concerned with your ability to block our cameras and break into the ships computer. The ships computer is NOT an old system.”

“You make us sound like terrorists,” I responded

“But after finding out how you beat the system,” she continued, “we realized your little band didn’t have motive or the sophistication to build the bomb.”

“Gee thanks,” I balked. There was that sarcasm again.

Alexander just blew it off. “Don’t get me wrong– impressive piece of work. Just not sophisticated.”

“So now you think somehow Johns is in on it?”

“Rebecca is an idiot. An idiot with connections, but an idiot none the less. No, we don’t think she has anything to do with the attempt on the lab.”

“Okay, so we come back to my question then – why am I here?” I was REALLY confused now.

“We need help from someone on level four.”

“You mean a spy?” I responded with surprise. “Me? No way Lieutenant. if you think for a second I’m going to snitch on my friends, then you don’t know me like you think you do.” I was almost incensed by her assumption. Then again, we had stolen the vid.

“Look Derick, someone on this ship doesn’t want…,” she paused, “is willing to sabotage this ship. People have been killed. We have pretty good specs on those who made the lottery, but there is too much about those on level four that we don’t know. We’re blind in comparison.”

“Why is it that when something goes wrong, you suspect its a norm?”

She seemed taken aback. “We don’t think its someone on level four, at least not just someone on level four. They would have had to have access to the labs. But whoever planted that bomb may have had help from someone down here.”

“Down? We like to think of level four as a higher realm…”, I replied with an edge to my voice.

“Damn it, Ryan, stop being so over sensitive. We need your help – I need your help.”

This story took a lot longer to tell than it did to live. I haven’t had a lot of time to blog since getting out. I haven’t decided whether to help Alexander or not, but she promised to keep Johns away from me and my friends That’s worth something.