Chapter 8
Subject: Maddy
When Chief told Maddy he’d be ‘forwarding her some emails’, what he’d apparently meant was ‘disable my email account and just have everything automatically roll over to you’. A sudden flood of notifications had alerted her to this brave new administrative world she was in charge of. She’d been keyed in on every message for at least the last six months and could see not only if the message had been opened by Chief, but if he’d replied, what he’d said, any drafts he’d prepared to send but didn’t, and if he forwarded the message to anyone else. It was the sort of access a tin-pot dictatorial manager of an authorization corporation would use to spy on their underlings.
Maddy sifted through the messages, most of them junk mail from the division server, auto-replies for reports, reminders to send in time cards, updates to policy, et cetera. An unopened message caught her eye.
From: ISD GENERAL ALERTS
To: DIST-GEN
Subject: ISD PUBLIC ALERT SYSTEM - COMMUNICATIONS DISRUPTIONS
Message: Due to fleet security actions, the Oasis System Rift Gate has been placed under temporary lockdown. As a result, access to faster-than-light communications systems has been restricted to fleet only use until further notice. Local systems remain operational. Thank you for your cooperation.
Huh, Maddy thought, we’ve been out of contact with the central systems for almost a week now. Something like this was kind of a big deal, and Chief hadn’t even opened the message. Maddy flipped through the inbox, sifting through message after message from the science team making requests or more frequently, lodging complaints. There were several messages from the local ISD security team- the local law enforcement, asking for assistance. Apparently, under some mutual aid contract that she was totally unaware of.
It seemed that Chief had gone through a period about four months ago where he stopped replying to messages, instead typing lengthy, rambling, obscenity strewn rants in reply to messages that had nothing to do with the actual contents of the message and not sending them, thereby creating a permanent fossil record of his mental decline in the drafts folder of his email account. The most recent message was in response to a request from the science team’s manager, who’d asked in a roundabout way if we could ‘please stop shooting the big cannon at the wildlife on every data collection run’, to which Chief had typed ‘listen you helpless rat fuck’, before apparently closing the email client and never opening it again.
This operation was way out of line and Maddy knew the burden of pulling it together was going to fall squarely on her, whether she liked it or not. She had an obligation to it. Her military service contract had just under seventeen years left. She knew that her tine spent on loan to the SAS could conveniently NOT count towards that service time if she made her higher-ups look stupid. Not intervening and preventing a disaster when you had the means was just as bad as causing the disaster. ‘If you have the means, you have the responsibility’ so goes the saying. And so Maddy started pulling together a mental checklist of things to un-fuck.
First, she needed to pay a visit to the science team. Maddy decided that they would be first because they were in the same building as her, and NOT because Liselle was on the science team. Liselle was irrelevant, Maddy reminded herself.
As she stood in front of what appeared to be an armored airlock door on the second floor of the station, it dawned on her what an incredible oversight it is that she’d never been formally oriented to the building. A good security team should be intimately familiar with whatever space they operated in, even if that space was temporary.
Everyone had gotten way too comfortable pretending they were professional big game hunters and drug-addict stomping jackboots and had apparently forgotten their core mission. In the Fleet Marine Corps, slipping up like that was a one way ticket to being smoked until you either died or found the will to become the best at whatever it was you were doing.
Maddy hit the comm button on the wall, and after a moment Liselle’s voice answered.
“Oh, Sergeant Maddy is that you? Is everything alright?” She sounded concerned. Apparently seeing security up here was irregular. Maddy straightened her uniform as she spoke.
“Yes, everything is fine. I wanted to tour the science lab and meet the team. I, uh. I’ve also been assigned as the security team’s liaison to the science group,” Maddy was painfully aware that in the right light, Chief assigning an underling to deal with the science folks when that was his whole job had the potential to be insulting. Like Chief had pawned off such an unimportant task. She felt awkward saying it, but truth was, anything was better than what they had right now.
“Okay that’s great!” Liselle sounded surprisingly happy. Maddy could picture the way her eyes lit up when something caught her attention. “Most of the team is busy right now in the cleanroom, but Doctor Carney is free- she’s the one you’ll want to talk to anyway. Come on through and I’ll grab her.”
The door slid open automatically and revealed itself to be an airlock or pressure equalization chamber or something. Maddy stepped in and saw the words CONTAMINATION REDUCTION ZONE printed in bold block letters on the wall next to pictograms of a T-posing stick figure. Maddy was trying to decipher what the room wanted her to do when the lights dimmed and an electronic pulsing sound reverberated through the room. A dim blue light shone from the floors and the walls for a few seconds, making her feel like she was at the world’s worst rave. Or, in the case of the world she was one, maybe it’s best rave. Who knows.
It ended suddenly and the door slid open to reveal Liselle, standing at attention with her arms crossed over her pelvis, her hands grasping each other. She was wearing a long white lab coat, like Maddy had interrupted her mid-science. Liselle smiled and gestured with a ‘come on’ wave of her hand. Maddy obliged.
They walked through what appeared to be a supply room, well stocked and immaculately clean and orderly. A stack of hundreds of what looked like air filters laid out with handwritten numbers and letters on them.
“What’s with the air filters?” Maddy asked, genuinely curious. “There’s like a thousand of them.”
“Those are a type of sample filter than we use for data collection,” Liselle explained. “Yesterday when we went into he field, we were changing filters out on the monitoring stations. You see, our team studies the airborne microbiome around the settlement. We have pretty complex monitoring stations attached to systems that take air samples periodically so we can get a snapshot in time of the life and how it’s changing. All of the data from the station is sent to us over the link, but we have to physically remove and change the filters on a schedule. It’s the basis for why we do field expeditions.”
Here was the whole reason why they went out into the field, the whole justification for the majority of their jobs, and Maddy had no idea until now. And she’d only learned about it because she’d happened to see something weird and was actively trying to make small talk.
Maddy’s last post was on an intermodal relay, before the accident that filled her with cancer and forced her onto Oasis, and she’d been required to learn every detail about the comings and goings on the station, no matter how minute. Her team had orders to stop a certain number of people on every patrol and interrogate them. If their explanation didn’t make complete, absolute sense, she was required to detain them and call for a supervisor. Her CO reasoned that if every marine on station was an expert on the workings of the station, then it would be that much harder to smuggle contraband, or weapons, or do terrorist shit there. It was a pain in the ass, and extremely awkward, but the reasoning made sense and you got over feeling like an antisocial asshole pretty quickly.
A tall, blond woman in a lab coat stopped them. She had a severe face, pinched in the center like she actively tried to make her lips look as stiff as possible. Her perfect posture screamed former military officer. She looked Maddy up and down, her face twisting into an expression that looked like she was sucking on a wasp; evidently appraising the security sergeant and finding her lacking.
“What do you want?” The woman asked. She spoke in a short, clipped tense and had a posh center systems accent.
“I’m Security Sergeant Turner, ma’am. I’m new to Oasis III, on mutual aid from the Fleet Marine Corps. I’ve been assigned as liaison to the science team.” Maddy tried for a formal approach, hoping that would counteract the disapproval.
“I’m Doctor Carney, research director for the Dominion’s Scientific Advancement Section and adjunct professor on exoplanet microbiology at the Tau Ceti Institute of Advanced Sciences, among other things. Tell me then, ‘security sergeant’,” she raised her hands and did an air quotes gesture when she said ‘security sergeant’, “why the fuck are the intersystem comms down? Even FLT comms IN system. They’ve been down for days now with no update. We can’t get our findings out.”
What a pompous dick, Maddy thought. “I’m sorry ma’am, but I don’t know any more about that than you do.” Carney scoffed at that. “I promise if I get any updates I’ll share with you what I can. I stopped by because we have an expedition operation tomorrow and I wanted to talk about how we’ve been doing these operations recently.”
“Oh is that so?” Carney pointed an accusing finger at Maddy, apparently channeling all the pent up frustrations with Chief at her, “OUR job here,” she gestured to herself and Liselle, “is to advance the human race. YOUR job is to prevent loss. You aren’t soldiers, you aren’t action heroes. Right now the ‘way we’ve been doing these operations’ is entirely unacceptable, and if you and your fellow knuckle draggers cant figure out why shooting a fucking bazooka at every one of our test sites is bad science, then I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not your mother, I shouldn’t have to explain how to have basic sense.”
Maddy had been yelled at a lot and had worked up a pretty tough skin against it. Sure, she was shy in social settings, but at work, she was playing a character. And that character was impervious to verbal insults. But, for some unknown reason, this woman’s tirade was actually getting under Maddy’s skin.
“I’ll talk to the team tomorrow and see if we can make updates to the collection procedures.” Maddy replied flatly, and turned to walk out. She didn’t need to fight back against the woman, but she also didn’t need to take heat without cause. Her ears burned as she walked away and she wasn’t sure if it was from anger or shame. The woman had a right to be angry, sure, but she didn’t have to be the worst version of herself to prove her point. Maddy hoped that was the worst version of her, at least.
Maddy had made it through the contamination reduction area and started down the side stairwell but stopped when she saw a figure standing at the bottom of the stairs. Chief.
“Turner, Sergeant Turner, I see you are attempting to ingratiate yourself with our esteemed colleagues,” Chief’s fever dream vocals made Maddy’s descent down the stairs feel like the first confused moments of suddenly waking from a deep sleep. “I see you’ve even met the Queen herself, miss Carney of Tau-CETI,” Chief added extra emphasis to the ‘Ceti’ in Tau Ceti, “the professor of all-knowledge, the arcane and natural. Listen Turner, I need to show you something, come with me.” Chief turned and start walking briskly, duck walking as he went as though his knees were splinted in place. Maddy followed.
Chief’s office door opened and a waft of smoke drifted out. It smelled of tobacco and cinnamon. “Are you smoking in here, sir?” Maddy asked, immediately regretting a second confrontation so quickly after the first.
“It’s a fire station, Turner,” was all Chief said.
His office had been transformed over the last several days. Monitors and screens of various sizes and models were arrayed across every flat surface available, with several mounted to the wall, and one lay on the floor with the screen smashed inward. Wires ran haphazardly in every direction. The monitors played camera feeds from inside and outside the station, with several outside, aimed at street corners down sidewalks. One of the screens showed the view inside the office, the screen showing a view of the screen she was looking at, giving the illusion of an infinite tunnel of screens and cameras.
“I’ve been surveilling Turner. Reconnoitering. Observing the enemy as they linger outside our castle walls. My plan is almost ready to carry out, but I need something from you, Turner.”
“What’s that, sir?” Maddy asked. She noticed that the Black Mamba was present in at least half a dozen camera views. It must've had three-hundred-and-sixty degree coverage.
“I need you to fulfill your purpose. Achieve your destiny, Turner. I cannot be tied down by the unending bonds that try to keep me from reaching my goal. There’s an infinite number of paths that we can choose from here Turner, but we can only choose one. I’ve chosen mine, and I can’t be taken off course.”
Blitz emerged from a side door with a file box in his hands. Chief smiled his snake smile, his skeletal features highlighted by the dim glow of the two dozen screens. “He’s talking about this, Sergeant. It’s the other half of your new job.” He handed the box to Maddy, and she saw that it was filled with papers, personnel files, reports, and checklists. Blitz mouthed ‘I’m sorry’. Chief lit a massive, hand rolled cigarette, puffed it, and grinned. Maddy took the box and sighed.
