This is Destination Europa, a psychological sci-fi thriller set aboard the R. G. Leifr, a colony ship headed towards Jupiter to establish a settlement on the ice moon Europa.
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Previously, Quill spotted a mysterious figure during his stakeout at the Deck 12 water dispenser, before being stopped by the sudden appearance of Safira, holding a gun to his back…
Safira’s arm at his throat was tough and tight as a hawser round a bollard. Quill knelt on the floor of the corridor, his breath rasping loud in the silence, while the weapon jammed into his back travelled round to his side.
“On your feet!” whispered Safira. “Slowly!”
“Saf—”
“Quiet!”
Quill started to push himself upward, shuffling for balance. In one swift move, Safira pinioned his arms behind him then cuffed his wrists.
“Sa—”
A tiny jolt of electricity from the gun, just enough to make him gasp.
“I said quiet!” she hissed. “Move. Left.”
She pushed him round the corridor and into a meeting room, empty at this time of night.
“AiLeifr, lock the door. Activate temporary DPS, until rescinded.”
“Designated Private Space activated for Meeting Room 12-C-Y005.”
There was a click as Safira locked the cuffs to one of the handrails that ran round the edge of the room, and for the first time she moved round in front of Quill. She was wearing a full-body chamaeleosuit, the material picking up the patterns of light and colour from behind her and displaying it on her front. It also, Quill noticed, suppressed her aikon; as she pulled the facemask up, her name popped back onto Quill’s visuals. She peeled off the hood then, shaking her curls out. Her eyes were hard and fierce. She leaned back against the other wall of the tiny meeting room, keeping the shock gun pointed at Quill.
“What’s going on?” asked Quill, the words dry and sticky in his throat.
She raised an eyebrow. “How about you tell me, Aquilla?”
He looked at this unknown Safira, at the chamaeleosuit and the shock gun, trying to put the picture together.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Safira, what are you doing? Why are you dressed like that? How on earth do you have a gun, for any sake?”
She gave him a pitying look. “Are you serious?” She lowered the gun then holstered it. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, you are, aren’t you?”
“Serious about what? Safira, I don’t understand!”
Safira rolled her eyes. “Honestly, you must be the only one in our little foursome who doesn’t know. I should give Bowen more credit, honestly. I didn’t think he was that good at keeping his mouth shut.”
She snapped open the top of her chamaeleosuit and rummaged inside, then pulled out a small rectangular chipcard and held it within his eyeline.
“Before you say anything, yes, we do still actually carry these things. Here, have a look.”
Quill blinked to access the card. The Olympus Mons seal, symbol of the Federation of Martian States. Safira Manrique de Rojas, Ministry of Intelligence, Division 7.
He looked up at her, his mouth open. She put the card away.
“You’re…”
“Yes,” she said curtly. “I’m a spook. Now, are you going to co-operate, or am I going to have to twist your arm, so to speak?”
“Co-operate with what? Saf, I thought..”
“What?”
“I thought you were a mole. Like, I thought you were working for the FSS.”
Safira stared at him for a long second, then the tension in the room cracked. She sagged against the wall and burst out laughing.
“You what?”
“I thought you were a mole. For FSS intelligence.”
She wiped her eyes. “Aquilla, you really take the biscuit. How did you come to that conclusion?”
“I kept seeing you prowling around the forward part of the ship. And then you had lunch with Alex from Navigation one time. I thought you were cheating on Bowen, first. But then I thought maybe you were up to something…”
She shook her head in disbelief. “This is going to make a great story someday. But now let’s get back to business.” She straightened up.
“Aquilla Augustine O’Neill, under the authority accorded to me by the Ministry of Intelligence, Federation of Martian States, I hereby charge and constrain you under the Official Secrets Act (2240), to as far as lies in your power never disclose, reveal or allow to be disclosed or revealed to any third party, any of the content of this conversation and any subsequent conversation or communication in relation to the content of this conversation. Failure to adhere to the provisions of the said Act will result in criminal prosecution. Do you understand and accept?”
“What?”
“Everything we say here is covered by the Official Secrets Act and if you blab to anyone, ever, you’re going to be in the deep freeze in Tharsis High Security for the rest of your natural life. Got it?”
Quill nodded.
“Say it.”
“I understand,” he croaked.
“Good. So, why don’t you start with telling me what you were doing hiding in a broom cupboard in the middle of the night?”
“I, uh..” Quill coughed. His mouth was uncomfortably dry. “Uh, Saf, is there any chance of some water?”
She narrowed her eyes, weighing the situation. “Alright. This might take a while. I’ll get us something.” She gave a short laugh. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“So, let me get this straight.” Safira twisted her empty coffee cup in her hands, eyes fixed on Quill. “You and Tark noticed some strange things going on, and decided to play Sherlock Holmes rather than talk to someone in command. Is that a fair summary?”
“I guess,” said Quill. He drank the last of the coffee she had brought, now lukewarm and bitter as dead leaves. She had released him from the cuffs once she was back and the door re-locked.
Safira’s gaze pierced him, and he glanced away. He’d told her about everything except the cabin break-in and the theft of his t-shirt and Fiducezol.
“Now some might wonder,” Safira went on, “why an upstanding and moral citizen such as yourself would take things into your own hands like this.” Quill felt a faint blush spread across his cheeks, despite the tiredness that had sucked the colour out of him.
“I, uh, didn’t know if there was really anything to report,” he said faintly. “You know. Don’t want to be the boy crying wolf and all that. I mean, what if I was just being, you know, paranoid? Spacey?”
Safira said nothing at all, her eyes continuing to drill into him. The sound of Quill’s own breathing felt loud to him, and he noticed the sour funk of his own sweat. He rubbed his left wrist, where the cuffs had bitten tighter. Is this how interrogations work? They just stare at you until you feel so guilty you vomit up every secret you have, relevant or not?
“Right, Aquilla, enough dicking around. You’re not Sherlock bloody Holmes, you’re not Watson, you’re not even Connery Khan in that stupid movie. Got it?”
Quill nodded, looking at the whorl of his finger pads, the scar from that time he slipped on the rocks at that beach in the Lofoten Islands, the thousand tiny triangles that creased the backs of his hands like a geometric overlay.
“We know about your Alliance carry-on,” Safira continued. When Quill looked up, mouth open, she gave a snort that seemed half amusem*nt and half exasperation. “Come on, Quill. You really think you were being that secure?”
“I, uh…”
“Don’t panic. When I say ‘we’, I mean us, Mars, MOI. Whether the FSS knows or not, I have no idea. Probably not, since they let you fly.”
“Really?”
“Probably. But anyway, Quill, here’s the thing.” She made eye contact again. “Your kind of goings on, your missionary crap, is the least of our concerns right now.”
“Oh.”
Safira rolled her eyes. “Oh,” she mimicked. “Yep. You guys always think that because your mission is so important to you, it’s important to everyone else too.” She suddenly broke into a yawn. “Right, it’s three in the morning. Let’s get to the point or we’ll never get any sleep. Here’s the thing, Quill. I’m going to take you into my confidence here. I’m going to tell you about some important stuff. But you need to remember that this is all under the Official Secrets Act.”
“So why tell me anything? Let’s just leave it at this,” said Quill.
Safira’s eyes looked weary now. “Because I could do with some help here. From someone I can actually trust. And inept as you are at the detective thriller cosplay, I know that even without swearing you to secrecy, I can actually trust you to keep a secret.”
Quill took a moment to absorb what she was saying. “Uh, thanks, I guess.”
Safira’s eyes flicked back and forth, accessing something, then she turned her attention back to Quill. “Sorry. Just checking no-one’s in physical earshot. DPS doesn’t keep prying ears out if they’re close enough.”
“Your DPS… couldn’t the FSS guys still access our feeds if they really wanted?”
“They could, but it would kick up a hell of a storm, let me tell you. Listen, Quill. The FSS are not our enemies right now. They know who I am, and I know who their guys are. We even work together sometimes.”
“Alex!” said Quill, piecing together some of his experiences. “Am I right?”
“That’s neither here nor there.” Safira narrowed her eyes. “Right, Quill, listen. Here’s the thing. There’s no way to put this gently. We have credible intelligence that there is a threat to the ship.”
“What?” Quill knew his mouth had fallen open again. He felt a little dizzy.
“There’s a threat. To the ship. Terrorists.”
“Who?” His head was pounding, and the lighting in the cramped room was uncomfortably bright. “The MFA?” The Martian Freedom Alliance — or Army, depending who you spoke to — were the best-known anti-FSS terrorist organization, though they had been moving towards more mainstream politics in recent years. Quill was fairly sure his Uncle Mike had been involved at some point.
Safira shook her head. “Word is, a fairly new group. EXODUS. Mix of Martians and Earthers.”
“Exodus?”
“End eXploitation, Oppression, something something something. A convoluted kind of name.” She saw the frown twist across Quill’s face. “What? Mean something to you?”
“No.. Well.. It’s the name of a book of the Bible.”
Safira shrugged. “Also means a bunch of people leaving a place, dunnit? In Latin or whatever.”
“Yeah. That’s what happens in the Bible..”
“Well, one of the aims of this group of scumbags is to end colonisation. Get people out of places they’ve colonised. Hence the threat to the Leifr.”
“Because it’s a colony ship.”
“Right.”
“But how? What can they possibly do, at this distance?”
“That, Aquilla, is the question. We’ve got intel that there is a threat of some sort. My FSS counterparts are less inclined to take it seriously. Their systems are the best in the game, the ai would have detected suspicious activity long before now, blah-de-blah. They’re more focused on the SymbioNor stuff. Demas’ stupid letter.”
“But you signed that letter!”
“It would’ve looked weird if I hadn’t. Anyway, that’s beside the point. My colleagues back in Olympus are more concerned. Reckon we’re looking at a statement act of violence, not industrial unrest. Problem is, we don’t have any assets close to this EXODUS group. Too new, too small.”
“So, you think something’s going to happen, not related to Demas’ protest, something big, something destructive.” Quill ran his fingers along the handrail, feeling the infinitesimal quiver of mechanical energy. He pictured the ship’s axis, running through the twelve habitable decks then the acres of cargo holds, finishing at the vast engines that powered them through space. He saw the concentric rings like layers of an onion, the whole thing shattering outward in a short-lived fireball, a flicker against the cosmic background. Or poison, maybe, something in the air supply, a hundred and twenty corpses coffined in Jupiter orbit, rotting into bones while the plants and insects of the Farm took over. He felt a grey chill in his stomach. “Saf, you’re talking about the lives of everyone on board!”
Safira nodded. “Potentially, yes. So you see why, well, I could do with an extra pair of eyes here.”
Quill examined her face, trying to gauge her expression, and for an instant, behind the hard shell he thought he saw terror, like darkness swelling from a bottomless well. He felt sick. What if I never make it back? What if my body bursts in the vacuum of space, or rots like meat in a broken fridge? What about everyone else? Will there be one-hundred-and-something souls doomed to a lost eternity because I was a crap missionary? Tendrils of fear twisted his throat, tearing and choking, and a buzzing rose in his ears.
“Quill! Snap out of it!” Safira clicked her fingers in his face. “Focus! Listen, I know it’s a lot to take in. But you have to realise, it might not happen. In fact, my job is to make sure it doesn’t.”
She’s right. He forced himself to focus, centring his attention on a tiny freckle on Safira’s cheek. Breathe. I’m in the Lord’s hands. I’m here for a purpose. Maybe this is the purpose.
“Now, as you pointed out,” Safira went on briskly, “we’re too far out for it to be some kind of external threat. That means they’ve either set up something automated, which was somehow smuggled onto the ship, or — and in my view this is more likely — they have an agent or agents aboard.”
“But why now? Why wait twenty-one months?”
“Who knows? More dramatic?”
Quill ran a hand through his hair. “So, the person I saw tonight. Do you think it’s them?”
Safira shook her head. “I don’t know, honestly. I didn’t know you were following someone, until just now.”
“So you were following me, not the ghost?”
“You were behaving strangely, Quill. Had to rule things out, if only to prove to my counterparts that a poor choice of team name in a tournament doesn’t make someone a terrorist.”
“But did you see it? Them? The person I saw?”
Safira hesitated. “No. I was nearby tracking your location through AiLeifr. But I didn’t physically have sight on you till you came out of that cupboard and started moving.”
“So maybe that was them. The terrorist.”
“Maybe. Maybe. I suppose it could have been a chamaeleosuit, though not a very good one, if you could see them that clearly. But…”
Quill saw Safira’s eyes flicker as she accessed more data.
“But what?”
“But according to AiLeifr, all personnel are accounted for in that timeslot. There isn’t anyone it could have been.”
The queasy feeling in Quill’s stomach intensified. What if it really is a ghost? Or what if Safira’s leading me on here? What if she’s just trying to recruit me for the MOI? Or what if this is all one huge practical joke? Can I really trust her?
“Don’t worry,” she went on. “With your permission, I’ll check your optics. Later. If you were seeing things, I’ll let you know.” She gave a quick half-wink, as if trying to lighten the air.
“So what do you want me to do?” he asked eventually.
“First off, keep your mouth shut and your eyes and ears open. Keep an eye out for anything else out of the ordinary. And anything you notice, report to me and me only. Got it?”
“What about Tark?”
“Stay close. But quit the dynamic duo thing. No more digging. I don’t want the FSS guys picking you up.” Safira paused, then went on. “You know what happened to her father. She could have sympathies for this kind of group, know what I mean?”
Quill shook his head vehemently. “No. Not Tark. Definitely not.”
“No-one is definitely not. Think about it, Quill. How well do you know her, really?”
How well do I know anyone, really? I thought I could trust Tark. I still think I can, but can I?
“Right,” said Safira. “AiLeifr, end temporary DPS. Quill, I’ll give you ten minutes’ head start to get back to Deck 8. Unless you want any passing insomniacs to assume we’ve been having a night of passion in the machine shop.” She winked lasciviously and unlocked the door.
Quill scurried as fast as possible up into the Green Ring then the Blue Ring. His vision was blurring and spinning, his ears ringing. He found the nearest bathroom, locked himself in a cubicle, and threw up.
To be continued…
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Cover image of Jupiter © National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, colour modification by SDGL.
Divider image: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M. H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL team, adapted by SDGL.
