Onekka - The Tragedy of Jaqui Fennet
Read Onekka - The Tragedy of Jaqui Fennet Online
Authors: Michael E Bell
Copyright © 2011 by Michael
Bell
All rights reserved. This ebook
or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of
brief quotations in a book review.
Produced
with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)
First
Published, 2012
Michael Bell
This is
a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Contents
The transport
shuttle lifted from the surface of the Moon and made its ponderous way into the
clutches of space. As they cleared the gravitational pull, thunder shuddered through
the hull, jarring teeth and blurring vision.
Damned ancient engines
.
An ear-piercing crackle blustered from the intercom, followed by the Captain's
voice, so quiet it was barely audible. "Sorry about that, folks. They
promised me a new gravity transmission months ago, but clearly we're a low
priority. Hopefully we'll survive the slingshot." There was a chuckle, cut
off as the intercom was terminated.
Below, the half-finished Moon colony complex dropped away like a sun falling
into a well. The shuttle fought its way into the star-speckled dark; intruder
or victim, explorer or fool. She cast her eyes downwards, lost in the low ebb
of those thoughts. Soon, she would be back on Onekka, and everything would make
sense again.
There was a subtle change in the background roar as the transport shuttle
switched to its deep space boosters. They would now fire them as they curved
towards the apex of a turn around the dark side of the Moon. This would create
a lateral gravitational inertia field, flinging them back out the other side at
immense speed, effectively thrown through space to their destination. The space
jockeys called it a slingshot, after some old movie. It was dangerous, but
saved immense amounts of money on rocket fuel, and money always won out.
The boosters fired, and she was thrown back into the hard foam of her seat by
the g-force. Stars blurred, but failed to turn into those little streaks of
light she'd always envisioned. The sheer distance of them rendered any speed
immaterial - people and their shuttles were nothing to the suns of the endless
night.
They swept into darkness, heads forced back and jaws clamped tight against the
thundering vibrations. Soon they were behind the Moon, hidden from the Sun and
Earth and even Onekka, waiting as she did not far from the planet. The first
multi-national space station, a product of rare UN inter-cooperation, Onekka
was a sovereign state in its own right, and a beacon of light in the fields of
biotech research and stellar propulsion. She was a masterpiece of engineering
and ingenuity, a grand achievement in human intelligence, and she was home.
Suddenly, everything was quiet. There was no other way to describe it - no
bang, no droning wind-down of power, just silence, like somebody flicked a
switch and turned off existence. The shuttle floated, dark as the deepest cave,
drifting aimlessly through the long night.
Then it shuddered jarringly to a halt, throwing her violently forward in her
seat, leaving her stunned. A strange, blue light bled through the view-ports,
pouring across seat backs and controls panels like sticky fluid. A flat
BOOM
sounded, the hull shuddered again, and she felt herself drop from
consciousness, spinning down into a dark abyss of nothing.
A fetid
presence infested the air. If she hadn't been dreaming, Jaqui Fennet was sure
the atmosphere would be toxic. She drifted
-walked-
along a corridor that looked like the inside
of a spinal column, except twice her height in diameter.
I'm the cord,
she mused. Sounds
-echoes-
drifted around her - distant gongs and
clanks, as though a building site was being called to arms ten miles distant.
Jaq studied the wall
-bone-
that surrounded her. Giant segments of
ivory-coloured solid, interspersed with a spongy matter that ... that breathed.
"Come," whispered a voice like a sigh on the breeze, and she was
whooshing along the corridor. It tightened as she went, pulled by an unseen
forced towards an ever decreasing circle of darkness. Her feet and hair were
almost brushing the edges and Jaq wanted to close her eyes, but the dream
wouldn't let her.
Then she was through, out into a cavernous chamber with deep red walls that
disappeared into darkness above and ahead of her. Jaq shivered, and then
wondered if a dream could be cold or it was just the gloom that chilled her.
She floated, her feet an inch or two above what looked like the mashed pet food
she'd fed her dog when young.
Floating - better than walking.
"Closer." Three shapes oozed into view amongst the shadows. They
looked like the pilots' chairs from the ferry shuttles used to shift folk
between Earth and Onekka.
"Yeeeeesssss."
Jaq peered as best she could, but no details presented themselves. She tried to
talk, wanting to ask where she was, but simply ... couldn't.
The central shape shifted, a small digit extending and beckoning. Suddenly, it
was right in front of her, nose to nose as her grandma would say. Jaq had no
time to recognise anything but a smell like week-old death and the sight of
hundreds of teeth. The open maw snapped forward, engulfing her entirely, and
she fell away into a dark nothingness.
As awareness knocked on the door of her consciousness, words drifted to her
mind like distant memories.
"Three shall watch, one shall fall. Many come to conquer all."
*
Jaq woke to a twanging pain in her breast. She felt hot - too hot, given how
expensive Onekka's atmosphere regulators were. Her multi-tog duvet must be
malfunctioning again. Something hard was pressing into her thigh and a warm
breeze swept along her back.
She shook her head, seeking wakefulness, and that twang came again, piercing
from her right nipple right to the centre of her chest. She moved a hand to
check, and found another hand already cupping her.
"Yeah baby, I know you like that," drawled a deep voice in her ear.
Suddenly that pressure against her thigh made too much sense. She pulled the
hand from her breast and slid from the covers, strolling to the porthole
without looking back. "Sod off, Derek. I'm not in the mood."
He chuckled in the direction of the back of her head. "You were damn sure
in the mood last night, sweet cheeks, and I do mean all your cheeks."
Jaq sighed and gazed at the Earth through the porthole. It was much smaller
than they ever showed in the movies, even from this relatively short distance.
When the shuttle first brought her up to the station, she'd thought there was a
mistake in the optics - such was the power of media perception. Even tiny in
stature, Earth had power. Waves of atmosphere curled across her surface,
enticing with the allure of home. She held her thumb up before her, remembering
a famous quote, and blocked the planet from view.
"The Earth is beautiful from here," she murmured.
"I'm more interested in the moon right now, Babes," said Derek.
"That is one damn fine arse you got there."
Jaq looked down at herself between the waste-length curtains of her raven hair,
viewing her breasts like an unveiled stage attraction. Her pale olive skin - a
gift from her Mother's side of the family - swept around gentle curves in a way
she knew men appreciated. She wasn't skinny, but stayed active enough to keep
the fat at bay. Guys told her she was pretty, but she didn't trust the
judgement of anyone willing to buy her drinks all night just on the off chance
she'd deign to sleep with them.
'You have a precious gift,' her Mother used to say. She sniffed in agreement
with her departed parent; a gift indeed, not to be squandered on walking
hard-ons like Derek Bant. The back of her head throbbed unpleasantly. Jack and
Jim had many crimes to answer for.
"Piss off, Derek," she said, an edge to her voice she hadn't
expected.
"Just trying to pay you a compliment."
"Pay your wife a compliment - go sleep in your own bloody bunk."
Jaq listened to him dressing behind her, marvelling that the sound of clothing
being pulled on could convey confused anger. She fought her instinct to
apologise - too much shit came her way because she worried about how other
people felt. Instead, she stared resolutely at the nothing outside and waited
for him to leave.
Not another word was spoken.
As her door slid shut, Jaq sat back down on the bed. She knew Derek and his
frustrations would need to be dealt with sooner or later. You couldn't even
slam a door on a space station where everything was mechanical. Getting away
from things was limited to a walk through a crowded arboretum or time spent in
isolation, cocooned in the tiny cells that served as living quarters. Emotions
had a way of festering, to the point where everyone acted like characters in a
TV melodrama. If you weren't shagging or fighting, you were slowly wasting away
on the path to suicide or mental ruin. There was a reason, she reflected, why
most postings on Onekka were limited to six months.
She'd been there three years.
Opening a drawer beneath her bunk, Jaq pulled out her pack of cigarettes and a
lighter. With the plastic cylinder nestled between her lips, she brought the
fake lighter up to its end, striking the flint on top. A flame-shaped light
emerged briefly from it, and her 'cigarette' warmed gently as it released
pheromones. Smoking was more like smoke and mirrors these days, but the actions
calmed her nerves.
The bed was white, along with every inch of furniture and surface. Jaqui Fennet
was the only colour in this room, just a warm anomaly amongst the cold.
As she puffed without purpose, Jaq wondered if she could be bothered to clothe
up and go to work. She had nothing else to do, but the daily grind felt like
far too much effort. She could comm in, tell them she had a bug. Station
protocols would confine her to quarters, delivering meals as required. In a
sealed environment, even the common cold was a deadly threat. Then a vision
came to her, of her boss seeing Derek in the canteen at refs time, and his
ensuing conversation with her jilted lover.
Jaq sighed, dropping her cigarette back in its box, and scooped up last night's
underwear from the floor.
*
Onekka's corridors felt like a prison cell today. Her first day here, Jaq had
marvelled at the look of the place. Far from the hermetically clean, clinical
environment of white walls and exposed mechanics, the main station area felt
like nothing more than a modern office building, which just happened to be
floating in space. In reality, much of the effect was illusion - vid screens
coated the inner walls so spaces could be changed and re-roled in an instant.
Open areas could be made to look vastly larger than they were. The station had
thousands of acres of floor space, but it sometimes felt like millions.
Not today. Today, Jaq saw what was really there. Perhaps it was the hangover,
stripping the world of its mysteries, or maybe she'd just got immune to the
place during her extended stay. It was hard to get excited about something when
you knew how it worked, and spent half of every day looking at its schematics.
Jaq rode the glass elevator from the residential zones in the 'bottom' of the
station to the working zones that occupied the centre. She'd tried many times
to tell people that top and bottom were relative concepts, and that the station
actually rotated constantly during wake-hours to assist the ai gravity, but
even in space, most people trusted the ground they walked on.
The elevator slipped up the side of a giant atrium. Below, the arboretum -
known colloquially as 'central park' - shimmered in a morass of green leaves
and simulated wind. Surrounding the impressive greenery was floor after floor
of research areas and offices, work place to the thousands of station
occupants. Every wall was either glass or pretending to be - all the way up to
the top two floors around the atrium. The top floors were a smoky grey that no
eyes penetrated. Rumours abounded about what went on up there, and the
imagination some people put into such things never ceased to amaze Jaq.
She rode to the lowest of the greyed out floors, waited for the security optics
to verify she was both alone and in possession of her own eyeballs, and strode
into her workplace as the door swished open.
"You're late, Fennet!"
Shit!
She took in her boss, Dane Garret. He was wearing the posh suit
today; the one he broke out for important meetings, with the shirt that fitted
him without flashes of hairy belly escaping between strained buttons. His fists
were planted firmly on his buried hips, and the scowl that adorned his face
could have knocked small birds from the air.
"Sorry boss," she said, feigning discomfort. "Women's
issues."
His expression changed to that mix of frustration and confusion when somebody
is caught on the back foot in a conversation. "Oh! Well, no harm done, but
come quickly. The Armcorp investment delegation landed an hour ago and they're
waiting in the boardroom."
Garret lead the way through a semi-open plan office, full of wood and
surrounded by vid walls of a city skyline. Jaq found it depressing that a city
was considered more calming for the workers that a country vista, or a view of
natural beauty, but an army of psychologists had done their bit, and the city
was what they got stuck with.
"I bet you're glad there was a rescue ship nearby when you took that
shuttle trip to the moon," he commented.
"Hmm?" She looked at him. "What makes you say that?"
He looked at her askance. "Well, you know, it all went tits up, didn't it?
There was some kind of engine failure when it was round the dark side, trying
to slingshot for the return journey."
"Yeah, of course," Jaq replied, but made a mental note to look up the
relevant log entry when she got back to her bunk. Her memory of the incident
was vague at best. Was she losing her wits?
"I mean, if that rescue craft hadn't been in the area," continued
Garret, "you'd have frozen or starved before another one got to you from
Earth."
They passed a door marked 'Sector 5' with more security devices than any sane
person would install, and Jaq turned her head to look as they went. Nobody
asked what was through there, and nobody had ever seen anyone enter. This was
station administration, concerned with the technical workings of all Onekka's
systems and the policing of research being conducted on the station. Jaq had
always assumed the door hid the central servers or some-such, but the
mysterious name intrigued her.
"Were you out on the piss last night, Fennet?" said Garret, breaking
her muse.
She debated lying, but decided on containment. "One Jack on the rocks,
Dane, nothing more."
"Your breath smells like stale curry farts."
Yeah, well Whisky wasn't all I swallowed last night.
. "Sorry, I
didn't have time to brush this morning."
"Here," he said, handing her a mint. "These guys are from
Armcorp's uppermost echelons. We need their money, and knocking them out with
your breath isn't the way to secure it."
She took the mint and kept the sharp response to herself. Whatever mood she
might be in, pissing off one guy was quite enough for a single morning.
*
"We have no issue with funding the research into metals and
combustibles," said the Armcorp CEO in his gravelly voice, "but we
object to the non-negotiable additional expense for 'special research'."
Jaq winced as she arranged the auto-minuted transcription on her screen,
dragging the comments to the appropriate speaker's section as they appeared.
The system was meant to learn voice patterns and auto-attribute after the first
half hour, but it had never worked properly so comment attribution became a
full-time job. The CEO's comments appeared on screen, a visual echo of what
she'd just heard. Until this point, the meeting had seemed to be going well.
"It's a standard clause," responded Garret, hiding his tension from
the visitors but not from Jaq, who'd worked for him as long as she'd lived on
station. He shuffled one foot beneath the table and the merest tick started
shivering in the corner of his eye. "All our contributors pay it."
The room filled with a silence so thick it could have anchored the space
station. Jaq watched Garret as he became increasingly nervous. He knew
something, she thought, and it was something he couldn't reveal to anyone else
in the room, including her.
Suddenly, she was remembering her dream from the previous night. There were no
specifics, but a deep air of secrecy and threat. She caught the Armcorp CEO
looking her way, apparently having given up on her boss, and she acted before
sense gave her the chance to back out.
"In Armcorp's case," she stated, "I feel we can come to a new
arrangement."
In the corner of her vision, she saw Garret's eyes widen as he turned toward
her in outrage, but she refused to look. Her gaze locked with that of the
deep-voiced man across the table.
"Perhaps," he said, "if we could be privy to some information
regarding this special research, and Armcorp's expected dividend based on that
portion of our investment, we could be more confident in the arrangement."
"Yes!" said Garret, standing noisily and extending a hand.
"Absolutely, something to look into. Let me spend some time detailing a
new proposal, and we can reconvene when I have it ready. In the meantime,
please enjoy the hotel and entertainment we have arranged for you. Helen will see
you out."
Caught off guard, Jaq rose to her feet and bade farewells as Garret's PA Helen
ushered the Armcorp delegation out the door. It had barely clicked shut when
Garret turned to her, his face as flushed as she'd ever seen it.