Chapter 13

It was nine months before I saw another office, and by then only Siân was still pregnant. However during those nine months I had been by turns bored and fascinated, sick to my heart, and even angry. I very quickly found out that Melissa was not on the moon, but I couldn't find out where she had gone. It didn't bother me that much as we hadn't got on all that well, but I would have still liked to have known.

The anger came quite early on when I realised that I hadn't been told something I needed to know.

Two weeks into my time on Lipskiy, we, as a family, were sitting in the mess hall after our evening meal. We often stayed there for hours, as did, I realised, quite a lot of people. The comfort of the higher gravity tended to make people congregate there at times other than meal times.

We were on the inside of the mess hall, the window side was usually the more popular side and filled up quite quickly. However our family had got into the habit of finding one of the larger tables against the wall on the opposite side, and heading for that. This time Siân and Huw were back in The Hole, as we had started to call our apartment, studying. Huw's birthday was coming up and he wanted to re-take his CAP test. Janine and her two boys were also in The Hole, as her elder boy had had a severe tantrum that day, and as punishment, she had made them both stay there. They loved coming up to the mess-hall and looking outside, so this was a real punishment for them. Food could be obtained in the apartment, so they would not miss out in that respect. That it caused her to miss out on the trip up as well, Janine just shrugged off as 'the joys of motherhood'.

The five of us, Stacy, Branny, Imogen, Roger and myself were just sitting chatting idly, when we were approached by someone I'd never seen or met before. The ID card on a lanyard around his neck told me he was sponsor, not concubine.

"Do you mind if I join you for a few moments?" he asked me politely. I smiled and nodded. His accent was so like Hank's that I couldn't help smiling.

"Ma'am," he said to Imogen. "Do you mind if I ask how far along you are?"

"Just over three months." She gave me a quick glance. "Why?"

He nodded but ignored her and turned to me. "Were you told that pregnant women are generally transferred to Daedalus towards the end of their first trimester?"

I'd never heard the term trimester before. It wasn't a British term, but a quick bit of logical thought told me what it probably meant. "Erm, you mean after about three months?"

He nodded. "There's not a lot of science on it at the moment," he paused for a moment, in deep thought. "A foetus is affected by the low gravity. The nanites in a woman's body can help to mitigate to some extent those effects, but it's best if a they can go over to at very least a point five G sometime during their third or fourth month. Even better if it's closer to a full Earth gravity."

"Oh. Do you mind if I ask, are you the base doctor or something?"

He smiled slightly, shaking his head. "No. I wasn't told. My concubine, my ex-wife, was seven months gone before I found out. I sent her straight to Daedalus, but the damage had already been done. The child's bones hadn't formed properly, and there was little the medical tubes could do at that point. They aren't set up for newborns and the very young. He's sixteen months old now, and has brittle bones. He can't come into a gravity greater than about a quarter of Earth's for any length of time otherwise he will," he shrugged. "Please. Don't let it happen to your child."

"Never?" I asked, shocked.

"When he's about five or six we can start him on a set of treatments that will slowly help to build up the bone structures, but of course his muscles will also need work as well. By about the time he reaches puberty, and he's mostly stopped growing, we can speed things up a lot. We hope, we think, by then he'll be able to use a medical tube to repair his bones."

I nodded. "Thank you." I stuck out my hand. "Thank you very much, I'll organise it now."

He shook my hand, gave Imogen a smile and a nod, and left almost as quickly as he had arrived.

"Sounds like someone's been a bit of a carrot," murmured Branny. I ignored her but Stacy jumped on it.

"There it is again. I've heard a few of you call people carrots. Why? What's that all about?"

We all burst into laughter. "I'm sorry babe," I said. "I would have thought someone would have told you by now."

"Told me what?"

"In Welsh, the word for carrot is spelled em-oh-are-oh-en." I grinned at her as she worked it out in her head.

"Moron!" she exclaimed, laughing.

"Yeah, but it's pronounced slightly different. Instead of 'more' it's 'morr' as in 'tomorrow'." I pronounced the word for her.

"Ah." Stacy chuckled and repeated it correctly. "So when you are calling someone a carrot, you are internally translating it into Welsh, and then pronouncing that word in the English way, as if it was the English word, and implying that word?"

"Yup!" I grinned at her and turned to Roger.

"What he's just told us means Janine needs to go as well," Roger said. He looked at Branwyn. "And perhaps you too."

I nodded. "Go and relieve her," I told Roger. "Send her up and tell her why. AI," I continued, sotto voce, "please find out who I need to talk to, to get my concubines to the medical bay on Daedalus."

That was when I found out that this technically counted as a medical emergency: any pad could be used, though it was usual to go via the first aid room, where there was also a pad, so that the base nurse could do a quick once over. It was also when I found out that Daedalus base was used quite extensively by the staff on Lipskiy for R&R. They had far more facilities, including a whole wing specifically for pregnant concubines.

I began to wonder what else I hadn't been told. The problem here, I mused, was that I didn't know what I didn't know. That was Wilkerson's fault. As personnel manager, he should have told me all this. What else had he held back from me, I wondered.

Imogen and Janine weren't barred from Lipskiy, it was just a recommendation that they stay at Daedalus after they had given birth to allow their babies to develop. The rule, it seemed, was that until a baby could lift and support its own neck, it was supposed to remain in at very least a 0·5G environment, and the higher the better. I left the two women there. I could visit them daily, as could any of the others. I found out that the transporter in the first-aid room could also be used to get in and out of the base at all times, not just emergencies.

I was at my desk, bored silly, one day, when I saw an asylum request. Most of the work, as Matt had said right at the beginning, was boring and tedious. He'd been right about that. We'd been on Luna about two months by then, so I hadn't quite had the chance to get as obviously mind-numbed as a couple of others in the office.

An asylum request piqued my attention. It sounded a little strange, but I thought little of it, logged it and filed it. A couple of days later I spotted another one. I looked at it and put it to one side. When I had a free moment I hunted back to find the first one and then went looking for others. I found a third fairly quickly, but apart from the fact that all three requests were from marines based on Rek, I could see nothing special about them. They were all from different people of different ranks, from different regiments, even from different nationalities. I pondered, made a note of them, and just carried on with my work.

It had caught my attention though, so when I spotted another a few days later, then a fifth six days after that, I opened a special file for them. I began to track the regiments. There were no commonalities there, but I suddenly realised one captain had requested assylum not for himself, but for his entire company. That did surprise me. Then I found one from a Japanese woman. That one fairly took my breath away. When I tried to find out what had happened to her, she seemed to have simply vanished. It could simply have been that we didn't have the information, Rek was after all a very long way away, and there was no reason to suppose that they would tell us everything that happened. I soon spotted that I couldn't locate anyone who had made such a request.

I tried to track where the regiments were, and was very puzzled by the result. It was obvious that there was something odd going on somewhere, but it took me nearly four months to determine that it was Rek itself. At first I wondered whether it was something environmental: something in the air, the ground. "AI," I asked through my PDA, "What and where is Rek?"

"Rek, in the Rekat system," I was told, "is a fairly Earth-like planet, with a gravity 0·78 of Earth's, and a similar atmosphere, though slightly thinner, and somewhat colder. It was one of the earliest systems colonised by Humans."

"Who colonised it? Where was it colonised from?"

"It was primarily colonised by North Koreans and Chinese, with a helping of Japanese and Taiwanese."

Japan and China had never been close friends, nor for that matter had the Japanese and Koreans. I couldn't see that particular mixture doing too well.

I went back through my notes. About three quarters of the assylum requests came from Koreans, with the rest mostly Taiwanese. I pondered what that could possibly mean. "AI, get me everything you can find on Rek."

"Confirmed."

Three seconds later, so it seemed. Matt was at my desk.

"Llew? What's going on? Why are you wasting time and resources? This isn't your job, get on with what you're supposed to be doing."

I looked up in surprise. Matt Harding did not look amused.

"Matt. I'm not sure if I've found something important, but I've definitely found something odd here."

"Go on."

"In the last few months I've come across twenty-three requests for asylum. In all cases the person requesting the asylum was based on the planet Rek, and most were originally from North Korea. There's definitely something strange happening on Rek."

"In what way strange?" Matt sighed. He didn't seem at all bothered, which puzzled me.

"I dunno. But when I investigated these requests, the men seemed to have just disappeared. It's almost as if the request triggered something that made them vanish. Why? Who's doing it?"

"What else have you seen or found?"

"In a lot of cases, the request was not just for the individual. One of the exceptions was also one of the few non-Koreans in the group. A Japanese woman. The reason she gave was that she had been gang raped not once, but three times inside of her first month. And she was supposed to be a volunteer?" I couldn't keep the horror and disgust out of my voice.

Matt just nodded for me to continue.

"The others all seemed to be requesting on behalf of them and their unit. Platoons mostly. I followed up on as many of those platoons as I could. They would go into combat and then would refuse to go home for R&R. They seemed to actually prefer to go back into combat."

I shook my head. "There is something very odd going on at Rek. This needs to be escalated."

Matt nodded non-commitally. "When were the requests made?"

"Well, that's the other odd thing. I haven't yet found any that is less than about eight months old."

"And you won't."

"What?"

"You put all that together through finding asylum requests?"

"Yes."

"Neat. I'm impressed. Forget about them. It's not important."

I was surprised. "What about Rek?"

He shook his head. "That was sorted nearly a year ago. That's why you won't find any newer asylum requests. Those later requests were probably originally submitted long before they were actually received outside. Rek went like Pyong. Both were settled by the Chinese, though Rek also took a load of North Koreans as well, then treated the NK's like second class citizens." He paused and shrugged. "Mind you, even today on Earth the NK leadership still treats it's own people like third class humans."

He gave a big sigh. "Pyong was seen first because the leader was so blatant. Rek's leadership was far more subtle, but just as nasty. That subtlety meant it took us so much longer to spot."

"Spot what?"

"Go read up on Pyong and Rek. It's instructive. Particularly in the way the AI's actually tried to prevent us from interfering. It's one reason why no one totally trusts the AI's any more. They, the Rek leaders, were worse than Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Far worse than Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe at their worst. Maybe Hitler's treatment of the Russians, Jews, Slav's, Romany's and others was worse, or Stalin's treatment of his own people. Maybe."

"Oh shit. But it's all sorted now?"

He nodded decisively. "It's all sorted. But I'm almost impressed you spotted it in the way you did." He frowned. "I'm far more concerned you haven't heard of Pyong and Rek before. Go look 'em up. In fact, do it now, before you do anything else."

I nodded and did as he suggested, and felt sick for days afterwards. The sheer depravity that those two worlds had sunk into was just awful. I understood now what he meant by comparing them to Hitler's and Stalin's regimes.

A couple of months later I finally got out of the pool office. I was put onto a project looking for asteroids that orbited the sun well outside the normal plane of the ecliptic. The aim was to put early warning sensors onto them. It was interesting, even amusing, but not exciting because unlike the others on the project I wasn't EVA trained, so couldn't go visit the asteroids we found. There were eighteen people on the project, but it was rare for more than about five or six to be in the office at the same time. Every time a likely looking asteroid was found, a pair of EVA qualified staff were sent to do a close investigation. By chance, because we were working very closely with the research departments of a number of universities on the east coast of America, this office worked on the same time zone as Matt's office. I got sent down to Earth a lot, mostly to visit and talk to some of the researchers, and on one visit to MIT nearly got caught up in a Confederacy extraction that went bad.

About this time I finally managed to get hold of the concubine still owed me for taking Janine: a young lady straight from Thailand - she hadn't even had time to go through her initial medical checks yet - called Kimmee. She had been rejected by her first sponsor for refusing to be beaten during sex. She would never be a sponsor, she had too many psychological problems brought about by her upbringing in the slums, but she was at least a pleasant person to talk to. At least, she was once we had cured her of her heroin addiction, generally healed her up and taught her English. I did have fun getting her pregnant though: she was incredibly acrobatic and body-flexible in bed. She was more than happy to be with us, especially once she realised that sex and violence, in our pod at least, were not bedfellows.

I had been on the asteroid hunting project for about six weeks, when I was shifted again. "Lieutenant Carter," said the AI suddenly inside my head. "Report to room A7E." I had been at my desk just over an hour and was just actually just about to stand up to get a drink of water. My project manager looked up. "Carter," he boomed across at me. "You're reassigned. Once outside that door you won't be allowed back in, so make sure you've got all your belongings with you."

"Yes sir." I quickly scooped up the small quantity of personal stuff I'd brought with me.

"Good luck young man," said my project manager as I passed his desk. I paused. "Thank you sir." There was no point in asking what I was heading to, he wouldn't know. "I've enjoyed it. I'd like to come back if the new project finishes before you do."

He smiled. "You just want your EVA."

"Yes sir," I returned the smile.

"I'll see what I can do, but maybe your new project will sort it for you." He stuck out his hand and I shook it firmly, before he waved me out of the office.

"Thank you sir."

I left left in a hurry. Bugger, I thought. My EVA training was due in five days. Would I still be able to do it? I hoped so. I would have to find out from my new project manager.

The new project room was only four doors up the same corridor, on the same side, so still an inner office.

I knocked and waited as I now knew was the correct form on the base. It might have been a secure base, but there were almost no locks anywhere. Safety, I'd been told, when I asked early in my stay.

"Come," called a voice.

This office was almost identical to the one I had just left. Only the maps on the walls were different, and the number of desks. Seven instead of eleven. Though now I noticed, there were also far more filing cabinets as well.

"Carter, hello, I'm John Maggor, Lieutenant Colonel if anyone needs to know. Welcome to the madhouse."

"Um. Right." I nodded. "Uh, Lieutenant Carter reporting for duty, I guess," I said.

"You guess? I hope not. Where you from? Originally?"

"The Black Mountains sir. A few miles from Talgarth in South Wales."

"Uh huh," he nodded. "Right, well unfortunately we are now mad busy. We have an operation in a couple of weeks time. Apart from the people in this office, only fifteen other people know about it, and nine of those are on Earth. I want to keep it that way for as long as possible."

"Yes sir. What do you need me to do? Is this something to do with the enemy? And do I get to go on my EVA course next week?"

"The enemy? God no. Not unless you call some of the people on this base the enemy. Which," he said after a brief pause, "a few might be if they find out before we're ready. This project is a strictly British project for now. You're here because you are the only other Briton available that could be spared. I know there's one other on the project you just got off, but he's EVA trained, you're not, so he was more useful to them. And no, you don't get your EVA course. What we're doing," he waved me to a chair, then sat at his own desk, "is arranging a little extraction from Earth. A very special extraction."

I looked puzzled and he grinned.

"Actually, we have one of the new kilopod transports, Boudicca, and we're gonna fill it in a single extraction. And if and when we fill Boudicca, and I'm convinced we will even if others aren't so sure, we'll just commandeer Braemar which is not far behind Boudicca." He stared at me. "Most of the preparatory work has been done for this, but there are some very important things still to do, things I need you to get sorted."

"A not so little extraction, then," I observed. "Okay, but what's so special about it?"

He told me, the grin on his face getting wider the lower my jaw dropped.