EXILE
Chapter 18

For the next couple of weeks, the future turned out to be underwhelming in the extreme, but such has been prison life for centuries. No convicts were transferred onwards to the moon, as the unit had been depleted shortly before Stein had arrived. However, more convicts arrived, swiftly filling the gaps. After their initial conversation, Russell had withdrawn into his shell again, almost as if his uncharacteristic outburst had drained him, a year’s worth of conversation used up in a matter of minutes. As the days passed, Stein observed his neighbour with an objective eye, analysing him the way that he knew George would always study people, looking for an angle, some chink in the psychological armour that every person coated themselves with.

On his second day, Russell began to shiver, despite the warm air of the unit. He sweated profusely, soaking his prison fatigues through. Once, when he tossed over, he looked Stein square on, but his glazed eyes looked clear through Stein, a thousand-mile stare that came from nowhere. Stein had seen it before, but worn by patients in a drug rehabilitation clinic that he had been helping to renovate. Those gazers were enduring cold turkey, and were in the grip of a major physiological withdrawal from their drugs of choice. But Stein was certain that it was not a drug that Russell was pining for - druggies were never deported, as there was always a major health risk that did not justify the cost of lofting them skywards. Scott Russell’s drug was the `net, his terminal was the hypodermic, the tool of delivery. By his estimation, Stein reckoned on Russell being without net-contact for four, probably five days. Unlike the day or so that normal drug withdrawal took to have its full impact, the less-obvious form of dependence took a couple of days more to become manifest, showing itself through the symptoms that were typically associated with other addictions.

Rather than aggravate Scott by offering any sympathy, Stein left him alone, knowing that only time would get him through the invisible barrier. That happened soon enough, a few days after the D.T.s first set in. Stein was alerted to the breakthrough by the sudden, but relative calm in the cell next door. When he opened his curtain, he saw Russell, sleeping calmly for the first time in days. Instead of waking the jittering form from his dreamland escape, Stein watched the passing parade of stars and planets through his cell window. He had now been in the remand unit for two weeks, and well into his third. As he looked out of his window, he took a paper cup from the dispensing unit, and poured himself a drink of water. One of the few good points of remand in orbit was the unlimited access to water.

Unlike dirtside Earth, there was no such thing as water rationing on the platforms. There were no unpredictable climates, limited natural resources or over-worked public sanitation units. On the platforms, there was total containment and recycling of all organic material, air and water. And with the hydrolytic operations on board, the regular shipments of freshwater allowed for every person to be at liberty to use whatever water that they wanted to. After all, none of it was going to leave the immediate environment.

As he drank, he noticed the slight, chalky flavour. Curious, he turned to the faucet, running his finger around the inside of the edge. Taking it away, he saw the creamy-white sludge residue that had come off onto his finger. He sniffed it - chalk, or something similar. Then it hit him - the small, white antacid tablets sold to fight indigestion. It had to have been added, as all potable water supplies were from the solar distillation units, halfway along the platform cluster. But who by, and why? For the first time, Stein felt that he needed to get information from the guards, in this case the quartermaster. Being told where to go, what to do was one thing, but being slipped compounds without his knowledge was against the basic Stein personality. It was the same response that had led him to actively rebel against an increasingly totalitarian government, one which had the informal motto “What the people know, they shouldn’t”.

He got up, and crossed to the front of his cell, looking out and down towards the axial hatch. The quartermaster was at his local terminal, running through some checklists. Stein could have saved him the effort, and told him that he still had the same number of inmates. Instead, he just called out, to get his attention. The unit was quiet then, so his call, breaking the silence, alerted the quartermaster immediately. Turning, he saw Stein waving to him to come down. Not really having anything else to do at that time but to look at his screen, he got up and ambled lightly down to Stein’s cell. Reaching it, he stood squarely, bracing his legs apart on the floor just out of arm’s reach of the bars. He didn’t speak, just waiting and watching.

“What’s in the water?”

“Water.”

“No, I mean this white crap.”

“That? Calcium salts.” The quartermaster had the bored appearance of a man who had answered the same questions too many times too often, and fully expected to answer the same questions more than that again in the future.

“Okay, I’ll spare the suspense, Stein. From now until you die, get used to it. The calcium additive is to counter the loss in bone density that comes with a lower gravity field. Each inmate is here for at least three weeks, during which their bodies acclimatise to the forced changes. And this is for free - you won’t be here for a day longer than necessary. There’ve been a few deaths up top recently. One of the quadrants is very short on labour.”

“Four days?”

“Ship’s on the way. Here in two days time. Unload rocks, load compressed gases, people, water, piss off.” Without waiting for a reply, he left, bored beyond tears. Stein watched the retreating back, wondering why people convinced themselves that they needed constant stimulation of their vastly short attention spans.

Four days? Not long, really. The last two weeks had passed quickly, it seemed. The routine was rigid, with food tubes delivered like clockwork. At least he now knew that the dietitians that he had heard about were actually living up to their name, and not just glorified chefs in zero-gravity. Still, he found it curious that such concern should be shown over convicts, the basic labour force for the moon, the labour that was as expendable as Earth’s resources had once been treated as. Why go to any effort to preserve bone density? Stein thought about it for a while, as he studied the break-up of a tropical cyclone, roughly in between Fiji and Australia. Stumped, he returned to the front of his cell, and looking down the row, he saw Newman hanging loose, his arms resting through his bars. Sᴇaʀch Thᴇ (F)indNƟvᴇl.ɴet website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

“Hey, Newman!” Newman pushed his face to the bars.

“That you, Stein?”

“Yeah. Got a question.”

“You think I have the answer?”

“Well, I don’t,” Stein replied. “Why do you think the Justice Department is interested in our bones?”

“Say, what?”

“They’re replacing bone calcium lost in the lower gravity.”

Newman was quiet for a moment. “Obvious, really. They don’t want us to break bones too often.”

“So? Why?”

“Well, look at it this way, Abe. If you get killed, they recycle your body, and bring in someone new. They profit. If you bust an arm, leg, hip or whatever, you end up in the infirmary, doing nothing to earn your keep, and costing them a packet to heal you. Even then, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be much good for anything, even if your bones did repair.”

“Figures. For the cost of some chalk, they keep their workforce intact.”

Stein turned back to his window, mildly surprised that he hadn’t answered his question for himself. Never mind. He made a mental note not to let himself vegetate, as so many others seemed to do. He had led his life by making his own decisions, finding his own information. Certainly, from now he was to lead a life which had most of the thinking done for him, but that was all the more reason to think even faster, more often, to be crafty, cunning to ensure his survival in probably the harshest environment that humans had ever set up housekeeping in. In the meantime, he had a new target to pass the remaining time.

If the lunar shuttle was on its way, then he should be able to spot it quite easily. The moon was close to the Earth, but what helped was that it was behind the platform, last in line from the sun. The approaching shuttle would have the sun reflected off it, and Stein would have the sun behind him. As the Earth passed from view, he began to study the starfield intently. He had seen it many times now, and was familiar enough with it to recognise the major stars and patterns. He looked for unusual stars, and spotted five of them. Two of them he knew to be planets, Mars and Jupiter. He was pretty sure that one of the others was Saturn, but he couldn’t say for certain.

Of the three others, one was probably the shuttle. The easiest, and fastest way to find out which one it was was to memorise their positions, and to wait until the unit passed that way again. The shuttle would be the only one of the five stars that would have moved position noticeably, owing to the scale of distance. Whereas the stars and planets were millions of kilometres away, the shuttle was only a few thousand.

Uncharacteristically, Stein found that he was impatient for the unit to swing around past the Earth. The ever-changing weather patterns and orbital position had no interest for the closeted watcher; he wanted the stars. Presently, the blue disc passed out of view, and as the white haze of sunlight dimmed out of the window edge, Stein locked his attention on the now-familiar spread of stars. Checking the stars off against their relative positions, he confirmed the large white star as Saturn. And, as for the other two, one was not only in a different position, but it was big enough for him to recognise as a single platform unit, being moved into a different orbit, possibly to be added to the platform that he was in. As for the other star? Definitely the shuttle. It had moved slightly, and was not significantly bigger, about what he would expect for a relatively small craft and such a humanly vast distance. Confident that he had identified the shuttle, Stein relaxed, yet he was still somewhat excited that he was able to see his future before it happened. He found it comforting to know that he could be familiar with the shuttle before he was shepherded onto it.

Over the next few days Stein split his time between meditation, watching the approach of the shuttle until it actually docked with the platform, and with mild, quick chats with Russell, talks that never really got anywhere and ended more or less before they ever began. Having survived the onslaught of full withdrawal from the single-most dominant influence in his life for the last thirty or so years, Scott Russell was once again the insecure, socially-inadequate computer hacker that he had been when he had first arrived, only now he didn’t physically pine for a terminal.

The days seemed less so to Stein, who now looked upon them as hours in the countdown. The numbers became less, and the Earth below no longer seemed to be important as Stein emotionally detached himself from humanity’s true home. For his future lay far away, and the shuttle, now docked with the platform, was to take him headlong into his new life.

Sooner than he had realised, yet punctual to the minute, the quartermaster and the escort arrived. Stein, Newman, Hulce and Russell were each taken from their cells and guided to the shuttle. Unlike when they had arrived, the men were not chained together. It was not necessary, as for the first time they saw the plasma bolt weapons that were standard issue to the lunar guards. Stein noted, not without some relief, that the man-ox who had escorted them up to the platform was absent. In his place were two helmeted members of the colony platoon. From the moment that they entered the shuttle, they were the sole charge and responsibility of the lunar administration. Stein’s group left the remand unit, Morecamb being the only one his group to remain. They were not the only group to leave on the shuttle. When they reached the platform hub, the convicts were passed by another detail of guards, heading back to retrieve another, smaller group from the cells.

Altogether, the shuttle would deliver seven convicts to the male colony, to be divided up between the quadrants according to need. Which quadrant each would go to had been determined by the warden’s team, according to each convict’s skills and professional background before their arrests. Stein’s one hope was that he wouldn’t be in the mines.

Once in the hub, they retraced their original journey, down the zero-gravity tunnel to the far end of the platform, back to the docking unit. As they passed the different unit junctions, they saw signs pointing down the radial arms to the units, describing each unit’s function - hydroponics, environment, hydrolysis, stores, power, central control, diet, engineering - the list went on, covering all aspects of a sustained environment in orbital space. Every hatch was closed and locked from the outside. Cynically, Stein was certain that this was a precaution against the oh-so-dangerous convicts.

They moved along, each holding onto the grab cable. A running loop that ran the length of the axial shaft, one had only to hold onto one of the many moulded plastic hand-loops to be pulled along at a comfortable pace. As each man reached the end, they were guided into the radial tunnel that took them from the hub, through the spinning arm to the unit at the far end. They had to swivel around and enter the tunnel feet-first, for the gravity slowly increased downwards as they backed down the ladder that lined the inside wall. There was only one path available for the entire journey, with all other hatches closed to their group. Entering the unit, they found themselves in a space that was the mirror image of the unit into which they had first been delivered, the two units at either end of the diameter of the arm’s rotation.

The convicts had no sight at all of the shuttle, and had only the memories of photographs and videos of the shuttles that they had seen when still free on Earth. The first indication that they had entered the shuttle was the sudden reduction in space. No longer were they in spacious passages and rooms. The shuttle was compact, with every cubic centimetre of space accounted for. The passage doubled as cabin space, with only a short angle to the hatch. No sooner had they entered than they were strapped into position, standing against the wall. Immobilised in a row, it was only a few minutes wait before the other convicts entered, to be similarly strapped against the facing wall, with the guards taking up the remaining space. Through the walls they could feel the vibrations of the liquefied hydrogen and oxygen being pumped into the storage and fuel tanks that ran down either side of the central cabin space.

About ten minutes after the second group had been strapped in, the crew arrived, two pilots and a payload-communications specialist. It was the sort of job that Mick O`Brien could have aspired to, had he not been so attached to Earth. If he didn’t miss the polluted, over-exploited expanses and its gravity so much, he could have enrolled for the additional training in communications and astrophysical telemetry, and secured for himself a lifestyle that matched the orbital salary that came with a posting as lunar shuttle crew number three.

The crew entered through the same hatch, and passed through the hatch between the two rows of convicts as if the passengers weren’t even there. They didn’t even notice - it was too routine for them by now. The paycom was the last man in, and he closed the hatch behind himself, securing it against the vacuum that it would soon encounter. As an extra precaution, as he retreated into the main cabin space he closed a second hatch, effectively reducing the space to a long rectangle. The small passage way, with a sealed hatch at either end, also served as an airlock, an essential item on any spacecraft. With the inner hatch secure, the paycom unfolded a small LCD terminal from the back cabin wall. On the screen were several pull-down menus, each accessing a different section of the payload and engine control sections of the shuttle. Satisfied that each system was registering at the rear of the craft, he pushed his way through the aisle to the cockpit, up front, closing the air-seal hatch behind him. In a worst-case emergency the cockpit could be isolated, if necessary jettisoned from the shuttle in order to save the lives of the three crew. No guarantee was ever made for the safety of anything or anyone in the cabin, the guards included. The valuable skills and training would be safely cocooned in the cockpit module with a two-week supply of oxygen and food to keep them alive while waiting for the rescue craft. Even then, there was only a forty percent chance of a successful rescue within that time.

Once in the cockpit, the paycom took his seat behind the two pilots. In a design throw-back to the early days of aviation, the seating was remarkably similar to the jet airliners of the later Twentieth Century and, unlike the early space shuttles, the flight deck instruments were as simple as those of the more advanced airliners. The paycom strapped himself into his seat with a nylon strap harness similar to what the convicts used, and began to establish communications with the platform central control centre, the lunar colonies and with the Space Control Command at Houston. Communications were by simultaneous signals that were sent by short-wave and VHF radio, and also by digital laser. The fine, high-powered laser signal system also doubled as the centre-point of a laser telemetry system, enabling the paycom and the three base contacts to calculate the shuttle’s relative position and vector. The paycom would process all information and communications, making sure that it reached the pilots in a form that would be easily and rapidly understood.

With the line open to the platform control, the pilot started his pre-launch dialogue with the platform, verbally running through his checklist and launch procedures. As the paycom established all lines and confirmed the security of the shuttle, its cargo and all-round readiness, he switched a corresponding bank of pilot-lights from red to green. With the panel before him all green, the pilot informed the platform of their readiness, and started the engine pre-ignition sequence.

In the cabin, Stein waited patiently, standing with his back to the cabin wall, strapped loosely and feeling the vibrations through the wall. He looked up and down the space - the cabin seemed more like a wide hall, only six metres in length. The third crewman had left the cabin to join the others in the cockpit. Shortly after the cockpit hatch had been sealed, the vibrations stopped, the tanks loaded with compressed, liquefied gases. In the quiet, he could hear the shallow breathing of the other convicts. The guards looked suitably bored and relaxed, but he knew that they were ready to react to anything, swiftly and lethally.

Stein knew that they were about to leave, but knew little as to when and how. Any questions that he might have had were answered when, after several minutes, he heard a metallic graunch from the hatch area, and instantly, the gravity disappeared, as if by a switch.

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