Chapter 8

Thirty local days after the discovery and destruction of the cholera lab, Gath had the duty at the clinic. By local noon, just four hours after opening, he had already seen sixteen patients, only two of whom had anything verifiably wrong. A major deployment was scheduled for the next day—a two-night maintenance trip consisting of an entire platoon of marines and more than thirty technicians to a dam at the very northern fringes of the AOR—and the inevitable wave of vague, unidentifiable ailments had hit in force. The malady was so common that the medics and med techs had come up with their own name for it: Off Base Deployment Syndrome, or OBDS. Gath examined everyone but so far had issued only one day off pass. That was to a marine who had no verifiable problem but who had never come into the clinic for such a thing before and was therefore granted the benefit of the doubt.

“So, is it still hurting up there now?” Gath asked his latest patient—a female corporal who had come in complaining of chest pain with her breathing.

“Not right at this moment,” she said slyly. Gath had just placed the ERE around her chest and she was smart enough to know that it was capable of measuring the impulses from her sensory nerves.

“So, it stopped when I wrapped the instrument around your chest?” he asked.

“That’s right,” she said.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit odd?” Gath said, his eyebrows raised just a tad.

She looked up at the ceiling for a moment, as if pondering the chances. “I suppose,” she finally allowed with a shrug of her shoulders.

“You suppose?” he said.

She shrugged again. “What do you want from me, Gath?” she asked. “You’re the medic. I came to you for help.”

“Yes,” he said with a sigh. “You did. And you came to me for help six weeks ago when there was a deployment scheduled for a risk assessment sweep outside Merced, remember?”

“Uh ... yeah,” she said. “My back was hurting then.”

“It was your shoulder,” Gath said. “Your back was eight weeks before that, when you presented yourself to Medic Bongwater the night before a maintenance assignment to Tracy reservoir.”

“Oh ... oh yeah, my shoulder,” she said.

“And four weeks before that, it was your hip that was bothering you when you came to see Medic Zennish the day before a major interdiction assignment to Reno. Are you starting to see a pattern here, Corporal?”

“A pattern?” she asked.

“A pattern,” he said. “Something that repeats itself over and over in a predictable way. It’s a very common word.”

“I know what a pattern is,” she said angrily. “I just don’t see one here. Just because I happened to get hurt a lot right before deployments doesn’t mean there’s a pattern. There’s plenty of deployments where I didn’t get hurt, right?”

“Well ... yeah, I suppose that’s true,” Gath had to admit. “However, when you do get hurt, it always seems to be the day before a deployment, right?”

“That don’t mean nothing,” she said. “It’s just a coincidence.”

“Of course,” Gath said. “And the fact that we can never find anything wrong with you is another coincidence, right?”

“Exactly,” she said, pleased that he was on her program.

Gath sighed. “I’ll leave you hooked up for a few more minutes to try to catch a glimpse of this elusive pain of yours, Corporal,” he told her. “If I don’t see anything, however, I’m going to have to assume you’re fit for duty tomorrow.”

She rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “That’s what you torkin’ medics always say.”

“Sorry,” he said, though he was anything but. This five-minute encounter with a perfectly healthy marine with going to result in a thirty-minute DOC, of which he was already down five from the previous perfectly healthy marines.

Leaving the corporal on the exam table, Gath walked back over to the desk in the center of the room. His holograph station was on standby, as indicated by the rotating medical corps icon that hovered just above the stage. He sat down in his chair and leaned back for a moment, feeling a slight headache trying to establish itself behind his eyes. He tried to will it away but it wouldn’t go. If it got much worse, he was going to prescribe himself a little broad-spectrum prostaglandin inhibitor to push it back down.

“Meddy, open holo,” Gath said.

The icon expanded and became the chart for the corporal. He quickly added a few notations to it, tapping here with his fingers, swiping a few check boxes there, and then recording a brief summary of his assessment findings. It was just the barest start to the DOC, getting the basics in while they were fresh in his head. He then closed the chart for later, putting it at the bottom of the pile, as it were. As soon as it closed, the DOC that he had been working on when the corporal had been brought in reappeared automatically. He looked at the lines and checkboxes, at the name on top, and realized he could not even remember what the marine for whom this DOC was for had been complaining of.

“I think I need to clear my head a little,” he muttered to himself. “Meddy, close charts for now. Bring up my personal mail program.”

“You got it, Gath,” Meddy said. “I will remind you, however, that, despite the directive from General Vaxine authorizing the access to personal mail during work hours in light of the coming extended outgoing communications lag, Supervising Medic Cooler has issued his own directive forbidding it.”

“Yeah yeah,” Gath said. “I’ll take my chances.”

“As you wish,” Meddy said. “Personal mail program opening.”

The charts disappeared and the mail icon appeared briefly before opening up into a hologram of tabs relating to the various types and stages of mail. Gath touched the one labeled “inbox” and it expanded into a file full of recently received messages from the last data dump. Items he had already viewed were darker in color than those he had not. He had sixteen unviewed files, most of them from bill collectors trying to extract payment from him that, because of the communications lag, they did not know he had long since made, or companies he had once done business with who were trying to sell him things he did not need. He clicked on a file from his mother, which he had viewed but not yet responded to. It was a holographic message, as were most personal mail messages in this day and age, showing her from the waist up. She was an attractive woman, her face just showing the barest hint of her actual age, her brown hair long and flowing over her shoulders, as was the Brittanic custom. He skipped quickly through the four-minute message, jumping forward in twenty second hops, just so he could refresh himself on the questions she had asked and the information she had passed on. Since the message had been composed more than twelve metric weeks before, and, since it would likely be another six to eight weeks before his reply reached her, it was a little like talking to someone in another dimension. But that was life in The Fleet.

“End message,” Gath said. “Compose reply.”

“Holographic recorder in standby mode at default settings,” Meddy told him. “Recording will commence when you start to speak.”

Gath looked at the spinning record hologram, which was where the focus of the recording would be centered. He put a weary smile on his face. “Greetings, Mom,” he said. “I just received your last message to me a few days ago. As you can see from the time and location stamp on the message, I’m still in the homeland, still assigned to the Central Valley Secondary base on the North American landmass. You asked me in your message if there was any possibility of securing a transfer to a place a little safer...” He shrugged apologetically. “Unfortunately, that’s not really possible right now. It’s pretty much written in stone that you have to do a metric year at a forward base before they will even consider posting you away from the homers. That’s how The Fleet works. I knew that when I put my derm on the pad. Don’t worry too much about me, however. As I’ve told you before, we never set foot outside our buildings without full armor on. And while the homers are a vicious, dangerous bunch, they’re poorly armed and equipped, almost stone-age level. They kill each other wholesale but they’re not much threat to us. I know you’ve seen the reports of some of the deaths of marines here over the past year, and, as I told you in my last message, I was even involved in one of the incidents where one of our people was killed, but the odds are still very much in my favor. There was a cluster of deaths recently but that was a probably a statistical anomaly and nothing more. And even when you consider all the factors, it was only ten marines out of the thirty plus thousand stationed here on the planet. And I’m not even a marine, Mother. I’m the medic who tends to stay in the rear and out of harm’s way.”

He felt a little pang of guilt at lying to her on this last point, but quickly squashed it. The purpose of the message was to ease his mother’s mind, not to tell the truth.

He continued. “I’m coming to you today from the clinic where I usually work. Meddy, give my mother a ten second zoom out of the surroundings, pixelate the patients’ faces in the shot, and then bring it back to standard.”

“Understood, Gath,” Meddy replied.

“As you can see,” he said, “it’s indoors, deep in the safety of the walls, a simple clinic like any other. I spend most of my days in here, taking care of marines who twist their ankles or bump their little heads, or are having allergic reactions to the air. Nine tenths of what I do here is routine and boring, like today for instance. I’ve fused a few lacerations, looked down a few throats, and dealt with an endless stream of off-base deployment syndrome—I explained what that was a few comms back, didn’t I? This is my normal day, Mother. Not quite the excitement and death defying action you’re worried about me engaging in, I’m sure.

“So, by now Meddy should have given you the tenth of a credit tour and brought you back to my smiling face. Usually they don’t let me compose mail while on duty but ... well, there’s been a change in the order of things recently and they’ve made an exception. You see, they’re telling us there is a shortage of data transfer probes in this sector of space and, as a result, they’re going to restrict afferent communications—those are communications heading inward from the outlying regions like this one—for the foreseeable future. After zero five hundred Universal time today—that’s in about four hours—they’re going to fire off the last afferent probe from Sol and we’re going to have to wait until the next one accumulates five hundred petabytes of data before it is fired off. Each successive afferent probe until the Doxy system, five circuit jumps from here, will be the same. In these outlying systems it’s going to take a while for a probe to accumulate five petes of data, so the net effect is that it’s probably going to be at least a Britannic year before you get another message from me. I’ll keep sending them of course, but they’re just going to sit there in the probe stations until they get moved along. You and the rest of the family can keep sending your normal comms to me. Efferent communications—those are communications moving from the AZ and vicinity toward the outlying systems—will keep sending at the same rate. Does this make any sense whatsoever?” He gave a cynical shrug. “No, it really doesn’t. We’ve been kind of puzzling over that one ever since we got the news and no one can really offer a reasonable explanation for why they didn’t just tweak both incoming and outgoing equally if there really is a probe shortage. That’s life in the Fleet for you. Sometimes things make perfect sense but sometimes, usually when the ultra-whiteshirts get their little minds operating without consulting with the actual operational humes, common sense becomes a little uncommon.

“And so, anyway ... speaking of outgoing comms and news from the Sol system, you’re going to see a lot of my face when this data dump finally reaches you. In the same batch with this message will be a lot of news comms and holos about ... well ... kind of a nasty incident we had here with the homers. I’ve told you how savage many of them are ... about the kinds of things they do to each other. Well ... a few days ago I was the medic on an incident that was ... uh ... pretty bad, even by homer standards.”

He gave her a brief rundown of the cholera incident, softening up a few of the nastier details but omitting none of the facts.

“To tell you the truth, Mother, this one is kind of gnawing at me. You told me a few comms back that I seemed different after working on the Sol, that I seemed less sympathetic toward the homebodies, harder and more jaded. Well ... you were right, of course, though I didn’t really want to admit it. This place gets to you and these people ... these people living in the cradle of humanity...” He shook his head. “It’s hard not to get jaded as you look at what’s become of them, their savagery, their ignorance, their unwillingness to change for their own good.

“In any case, since I was the medic in charge of the operation, the whiteshirts and the command docs kind of made me the holo-boy of the incident. I think the fact that I’m a groundie probably factored in as well. You see, I’ve been told by someone who should know that there is a major change of Homeland Policy coming up and they know that the groundborn populations are the ones who are most opposed to any such change in the policy. As such, they recorded a briefing and an interview with me where I discuss all the nasty little details of the cholera incident and they’ve been showing it non-stop here in the Sol ever since it happened along with a lot of the holos I took on the mission, the most graphic ones in particular. I’m now kind of famous here and I have no doubt the same holos will go streaming out across human space—from one end to the other, but especially to the Fleet associated planetary populations—once it gets dumped out of the Sol circuit point. I was pretty mad when I gave that interview, Mom. Everything from that day was still fresh in my mind. I could still smell the swamp gas and feces, could still see the faces of those kids ... those children...” He shook his head. “I’m still mad, still disgusted by what these people are capable of doing, but I’ve had time to think now and I’m hoping they’re not just using my words as simple propaganda. That was not my intention when I gave that interview, when I composed that report, and if it comes across that way on Brittany, in the rest of human space ... I just want you and everyone who knows me to understand that ... well ... while I think that some modification of Homeland Policy might be in order ... I don’t hate these people and I am not an advocate of starving them or abandoning them. I just think we need to come up with something different ... something that does not just perpetuate this whole cycle of helplessness and despair they’re in.”

He sighed again, pausing almost long enough for the holo recorder to automatically pause. “I don’t know, Mom,” he finally said. “Maybe the whiteshirts and the spacie politicians really did come up with a solution. Maybe I’m worried about nothing. In any case, that is how things are going here in the Sol. I’m hoping to send a comm to Dad and sis as well but since I’m on duty until well past the final relay probe, I might not get a chance. If that is the case, could you please forward this comm to them and send them my love? I’ll be in touch when I can. Hopefully the next time you hear from me, I’ll be in a better place. All my love, Gath.

“Meddy, end recording.”

“Recording stopped,” Meddy replied. “Would you like to send?”

“Yes,” Gath said. “Go ahead and send it.”

The spinning mail icon began to send faster and the word “SENDING” appeared above it, flashing in red. A few seconds later, “SENDING” changed to “SENT”. A notation in smaller print, always present when a message had to pass through one or more circuit points, explained that, due to the variables of interstellar communication, there would be a necessary delay before the recipient received the correspondence.

“Returning to inbox,” Meddy said.

Gath looked at the tabs for a few moments, looking mostly at the last message from his father. He and his mother had officially dissolved their marriage now and he was involved in a romantic relationship with a female agricultural engineer he had met during a revamp of his farm. Her name was Andronicus Dealerman (Andy for short), and she was an attractive dark-haired girl with brown eyes and an engaging smile and tremendously large breasts. Gath had never met her, had only seen holos of her but she seemed nice enough, at least she did based on his father’s and sister’s descriptions of her. He ought to send him a personal holo as well, he knew, but his sense of duty kept him from opening the tab and starting a recording.

“Meddy, close mail program and get me the charts back,” he said.

“As you wish, Gath,” Meddy replied, making it so.

Gath’s message, like all such messages, was converted into binary code, encrypted, and sent from the medical holographic terminal via ultra-high frequency electromagnetic radiation to a base network receiver on the ceiling of the clinic. From there, fiber optic cable carried the message to the primary CVS server which shipped it through more fiber optic cable to a satellite transmitter atop a tower near the CVS base operations building. Once there, it was transmitted by microwave radiation to a communication satellite in geosynchronous orbit over the Amazon basin of Earth. From there, it went to a satellite receiver sphere mounted on the underside of the structure of Homeport Topside where it traveled through even more fiber optic cable to the primary server for Fleet Operations, Sol sector. This is the path that any message sent by Gath or anyone else in the Fleet who was stationed on Earth would have taken, even if the message had been intended for a user at a terminal across the room from the sender.

This part of the journey took a little more than one fourth of a second. From the primary server, the message was now supposed to be duplicated, with one copy dropped in the SENT file of the message’s author: registered user Gathius Stoner, Fleet Medic. The original was then supposed to be sent via boosted microwave radiation to the Sol-Proxima circuit point, either directly across open space to the circuit point’s receiver dish, or, if the circuit point was not currently in line of sight due to eclipse of either the Earth or Sol, to routing satellites in orbit of Mars or Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, whichever was more convenient, and then to the Sol-Proxima communications relay. This part, however, did not take place as it was supposed to.

A few lines of code had been inserted into the routing subroutine twenty-seven local days before. This code instructed a recently installed program to decrypt and scan any outgoing personal mail for specific phrases and content. Had none of those phrases or any of that content been present, the mail would be sent on its normal journey to the circuit point and a duplicate made and dropped in the sender’s SENT box. Gath’s message, however, did contain some of those phrases and some of that content. As such, it was diverted into a holding file deep within the server’s storage bin, behind three layers of voice pass and fingerprint guarded security programs. Once the message arrived in the bin, a return message was sent to user Gathius Stoner, telling him his message had been successfully transmitted, even though it had not been, and another message was sent to a holo terminal on the thirty-eighth sublevel of Homeport Topside, a terminal that sat in a private office inside of a secure subsection of the Fleet Operations area—a subsection that was accessed through a guarded door that was labeled OFFICE OF FLEET INTELLIGENCE.

Thirty seconds after the message was dropped into this special box, a second career age man named Gauge Flippart, Flip for short, had opened it and was reviewing it. Flip held the rank of Commander, the naval equivalent of a lieutenant colonel. This was a very modest rank in a building where most of the marine generals and fleet admirals who ran things in the Sol system had their respective offices, but in this case, the rank was deceiving. As the head of Fleet Intelligence in the Sol system, Commander Flip and his contingent of ninety men and women existed outside the traditional chain of command and in many ways were considered to be above it, able to utilize it for their goals and directives, many of which came directly from the upper echelon of Fleet Operations in Alpha Zulu or, as was the current case, from the very members of the civilian Executive Committee that ruled civilized human space itself.

Flip’s office, in contrast to the power that could be wielded from within it, was unassertive, with only a single desk with two holo terminals. There was no window, no private shitter, no couch, no water dispenser. On the wall above his standard issue office chair were a few photographs of his family. There was his wife of thirty-nine years, Amelesia, who lived in a bi-level residence in the Zanteca Space Complex nine circuit jumps away. There were his two children Veva and Syst, who were thirty-six and thirty-three respectively, the former a recently promoted Fleet lieutenant who was serving as a weapons officer aboard an assault landing ship in the rebellious Oleander Cluster, the latter a mid-level manager for Sparring Industries in the Hulu System, a company that provided the Fleet with communications equipment. There was, of course, no picture of his current lover Thepa, a thirty-three year old civilian woman who owned and operated a contract bakery that provided the Fleet stationed at Topside with sugary desert items, the likes of which were one of the few food luxuries that spaceborn consumed with any regularity.

He watched Gath’s private holograph message to the end and then replayed it once more, just for clarity. He shook his head slowly as the narrative neared the end, feeling anger primarily, but also the slightest bit of shame at what he was doing and what now had to be done. Still, these were trying times and the solution to a thousand-year-old problem was now at hand. He would do what he needed to do to be sure that solution was carried out without interference.

“Telly,” he told his computer, “return the mail message from Medic Stoner to the storage file and continue to notify me if any more are flagged.”

“As you wish,” the computer replied, its voice feminine with just a hint of a husky Alpha Zulu accent.

“Hold any further messages from Medic Stoner in storage until after the last afferent probe is fired. Once that occurs, go ahead and send them to the next probe.”

“As you wish.”

“And get me Doc Bookender. Highest priority.”

“Comming Doc Bookender,” he was told.

It took less than thirty seconds for Doc Bookender’s face to appear on the holo stage. He was wearing his standard white shirt of command, his face unsmiling, the stress of these past weeks showing on it.

“Bookender here,” his holo said, giving a nod of recognition. “What’s the word, Flip?”

“How are things going down there, Book?” he asked. “Is everything still moving forward?”

“Right on schedule,” Bookender told him. “We’ll be ready to kick off the operation one metric week after that last afferent probe fires off.” He shook his head a little. “I still think we should wait half a cycle, maybe more. If we give the new policy briefing to the Sol system just three days after that last afferent probe fires, people are not going to help but see the connection. They’re already going to suspect that that little probe shortage you’ve cited as the communications delay is ratslag—purg, a lot of them suspect that now—but with only a one-week period between that two events...”

Flippart sighed. “I hear you, Book,” he said. “Truly I do. We want to get this operation rolling as fast as possible though. We need to be well immersed in it by the time the first of the delayed afferent probes fires and all those messages and reports of what we’re doing starts working its way back to the groundies in the inner systems. We need to be well beyond the point of no return by then. At least with Phase 1.”

“The groundies are eventually going to hear about this,” Bookender reminded him. “Remember, it will take sixteen metric years for the entire plan to be carried out to completion. You’re not going to be able to contain news in the Sol system until then. I would be amazed if you managed to contain it even through this probe shortage period you’ve manufactured.”

“Look,” Flippart said, “We don’t really have to worry about the groundie population. We have authorization for this operation. Authorization under the constitution of the Federation of Human Space Inhabitants. This authorization was approved by both houses of the legislature and signed into law by unanimous vote of the Executive Committee.”

“Yes,” Bookender said. “And it was all done in secrecy, without any news being released to our own people, let alone the various governments of the groundborn.”

“There is a clause in the constitution that says the information can be classified if there is a credible threat to the lives of marines or Fleet members,” Flippart insisted.

“Yes,” Bookender agreed with a sigh. “And you know as well as I do that this threat you’re hypothesizing is quite a stretch of the imagination.”

“Some may say that,” Flip said softly.

“Many may say that,” Bookender countered. “Quite frankly, I’m amazed that none of those legislative members have leaked anything to the media yet. That alone should tell you how grave what we’re planning to do here is.”

“Are you having second thoughts, Bookender?” Flippart asked pointedly. “I seem to recall that the entire basis of this plan was your idea.”

“I’m not having second thoughts about the plan itself,” Bookender said. “It is the most humane and practical solution to the problem of the homeland. I am having second thoughts about the secrecy however. If it’s such a great plan, why are we afraid to have the groundborn planets hear about it? Why are we engaging in what some would say is unconstitutional suppression of information?”

“We have no obligation under the constitution to tell the groundborn about this operation,” Flippart repeated.

“Agreed,” Bookender said. “But what about suppressing release of media reports from the Sol system under the guise of a probe shortage?”

“That is in a bit of a gray area,” Flippart reluctantly admitted. “However, it was deemed necessary by myself, the Speaker of the Legislature, and the Executive Council and I do have a legal order from that body to carry out such suppression. My common sense dictates to me that this is an order that makes sense and should therefore be obeyed. I have the utmost faith that a federal judge, if one should review this order and my response to it, would agree.”

“But no federal judge has been told about this order,” Bookender said.

“That is neither fore nor aft,” Flippart said. “In any case, what I commed you about in the first place has direct bearing on this order.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. One of your docs has prematurely released information to one of the working medics on the surface. Because of this, there is now a group of people who know we’re about to announce a major change in Homeland Policy.”

“One of my docs?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”

“Doc Voogle, your head of western hemisphere medical operations,” Flippart told him.

“Vee?” he asked. “Are you sure? She has been instrumental in the planning of this operation. She is the one who interviewed Medic Stoner about that nasty business near NAWM. She is the one who released those interviews and the holos he took of the incident to the press so they could be shipped out with the last afferent probe and rile up the population. It is those holos and those reports that might just keep the groundies on our side when the slag finally hits the intake.”

“Yes, all very commendable and a fine job on her part,” Flippart said. “She also apparently let it slip to Medic Stoner that a major change in homeland policy was soon to be announced and that this change was being referred to as a ‘concluding resolution’.”

“Vee told Stoner that?”

“She did,” Flippart confirmed. “And because she did, Stoner has apparently been flapping his jaw about it to every medic and marine at CVS. Some of those medics and marines, in turn, have spread that rumor to the outlying outposts they visit and even to NAWM, where other medics, marines, docs, and civilian scientists stage for travels far and wide across this little slaghole of a planet where they may then spread it to other Fleet personnel. Fortunately, the further the rumor spreads from flapping mouth zero, Stoner, the less coherent and accurate it gets, but still ... this is a serious breach of operational security and it has had me scrambling to keep it contained.”

“Contained?” Bookender said slowly, a scowl forming on his face. “How are you keeping it contained?”

“The rumor itself cannot be kept contained,” he admitted. “What I can do, however, and what I have been doing, it keep any trace of it from filtering out of the Sol system in that last probe.”