Seasons of Murder: In the Shadow of This Red Rock Read online

  “Son of a bitch. You sure about that? Awful lot riding on this small fricking disc, Lieutenant.”

  “It’s one hundred percent reliable, yes. I have sent you the data on the trials. I thought you would find them interesting.”

  “What’s it powered by?”

  “That’s the really clever thing, sir. It runs on electrical activity in the brain; it can’t get a flat battery, so to speak.”

  “And how do we know if it’s working?”

  “I’ll test them, sir, on a regular schedule that’s been agreed on. My opposite number on Titan will take over that role when we get there. It’s rather like the tagging devices we use for persistent criminals. If they’re interfered with in any way, or they stop working, I’m alerted. However, I’ve also been issued a supply of Caripenidone, and in extremis, if an inhibitor stops working, I will administer the drug.”

  “Uh-huh. One hundred percent reliable, but they’ve issued you a backup plan. Am I a cynical old spacer, Cal, or do I detect the whiff of political bullshit here?” The captain waved his hand in a gesture Cal took to mean an answer wasn’t required and then added, “So, what do we—you—do now?”

  “Firstly, I need to set up a series of meetings with the crew and passengers. The same briefings will be held simultaneously with people on Earth and the colonists on Titan. It’s anticipated that this will not be an easy sell.”

  “Oh, I can damn well predict right now that I’m going to have a mutiny on my hands. They’ve grown up with these fuckers as the bogeymen of their nightmares!”

  “I have a schedule for the briefings so they will be complete by the time we rendezvous with the craft from Mars. I will go on board with my men and we will fit and test the inhibitors there before the Minders step one foot upon human soil—so to speak.”

  “Well what’s going to protect you until you get the fuckers locked down?”

  Cal smiled for the first time. “Faith, sir. I believe I was told to pray.”

  §§§

  The briefings went much as expected. Some of the crew demanded to be released from their contracts, but as they were in space on route to Titan this was slightly impractical. As Cal had pointed out, only one thing got Inter-Sol Corp ships turned around, and, as of yet, no one had been murdered on board any transport where he was head of security—but he’d added, seeing the mutinous look upon the self-appointed leader of the vocal group—there was always a first time…That had elicited rueful grins and some backing down, and the atmosphere had lightened.

  The passengers were equally concerned, especially when they discovered that Titan had been selected to host the reintegration trials. It was one thing being sealed up with mind readers on a ship that could, in theory, in extremis, return to Earth and off-load the monsters; but to be trapped in a colony on an orbiting moon with them, with infrequent resupply and no support, was another matter. Minders could come, but what the hell did you do with them if you needed them to leave?

  On his course, Cal had sat through lecture after lecture on subjects with imaginative titles such as ‘Minders: Monsters or Misjudged?’ or ‘One Hundred Facts About Minders You Never Knew’. He’d walked out of ‘Is Inter-Sol Corp Institutionally Mindist?’ and had been ordered to apologise to the instructor and write an assignment explaining how he was going to overcome prejudice on the ship. He didn’t submit his first attempt, where he’d proposed that if he shot the Minders before they could come on board there would be no prejudice, and instead filed a beautifully argued piece of meaningless crap about integration, harmony, awareness, cohesion, and cooperation. He’d downloaded it from a cheat site. #Minderlivesmatter

  So, he appeared well placed to be the front man of the Minder project. Privately, he preferred his shooting option.

  After two weeks of briefings and another one of follow-up group support sessions, it was Minder Day Minus 1, and he used his morning orders group with his team to plan for the rendezvous the following day with the small craft bringing the Minders from the colony.

  His deputy section commander, James Hunter, was a ranker, as Cal had been before being picked up for officer training. Hunter had extensive military experience quelling water riots on Earth before he’d transferred into Inter-Sol Corp for a quiet life and to get away from people who wanted to shoot him.

  Cal liked him, as much as he liked anyone. Hunter was English and had a wry sense of humour, but didn’t really give a fuck about anything or anyone, which suited Cal down to the ground. Hunter particularly disliked Titan colonists, much to everyone’s amusement. But Titans were a prickly bunch—as you might expect from people who chose to live in the furthest reaches of the solar system in a permanent orange glow.

  Cal shared much of Hunter’s misanthropy and so occasionally allowed himself to relax around the Englishman, to the extent that once or twice they’d spotted for each other in the gym. That was a deep friendship as far as Cal was concerned. He nodded now to the man who shot to his feet with the other members of the section as their boss came into the tiny crew room. He told them to sit easy and took his own place at the head of the briefing table.

  “Morning. Last day to get it right. How’s morale on board?”

  Hunter rubbed his chin as he flicked through some pages on his tablet. “A minor scuffle in the mess hall last night when salad finally went off the menu. Oh, no, that was you, Boss.”

  Everyone laughed, and Cal allowed the familiarity. He even bent down and peeled a fake orange maple leaf off the sole of his boot. “Anyone need another…?” He trailed off at the chorus of groans and scrunched the fragile tissue paper and aimed it at the wastebasket.

  He knew what everyone really wanted to talk about so he slowly laid his arms on the table, laced his fingers together and said, “We have the rest of this day to go over the plan and rehearse every step of this rendezvous. If you have questions, now is the time to ask them, not when we’re knee-deep in Minders and inhibitors.”

  He sensed all the humour dissipate and an uneasy tension filled the little briefing room.

  “I have a question, Boss.”

  Cal nodded at Hunter. He reckoned the guy had been nominated from the cast of thousands to ask the awkward questions. No one wanted to be openly pegged as a mindist, although it was unofficially and universally agreed that they were little better than monsters.

  “Rumours are flying around that one of these Minders might be a Sender.”

  Tension now ratcheted up into murmurings and a palpable sense of fear. Cal looked each of his section in the eye then enunciated carefully, “Senders do not exist—despite what you read and see in movies.”

  The corporal spoke up. “With all due respect, sir, they’ve been in that damn colony for nearly three hundred years. Isn’t it more than likely that all that inbreeding would produce a Sender? There was one during the Wars. That’s a fact. They say he could read minds right across the planet and send his thoughts into anyone’s head.”

  Corporal Holliday was a man Cal privately detested, as he was overzealous, with a little-man’s sense of self-importance. Only recently, Cal had witnessed him searching passengers and had seen him virtually grope a woman in front of her family. Holliday had claimed she’d been hiding contraband—in her snatch. Cal had been as unsurprised by the vulgarity as he had been that it was Holliday being officious about drugs once again. As punishment, he’d put Holliday in charge of security for the Caripenidone. Hopefully some would go missing, and he could sack him. Now, however, he had to appear to take the question seriously.

  “Who won the War, Holliday?”

  “Well, we did.”

  “Exactly. Do you seriously think if an all-powerful being like that had really existed we’d have stood a chance? A Minder can only read minds of people he is actually in physical contact with. We all know this. Ignore what you watch in horror movies—every single study done on Minders proves it. Remember the mantra—SOS: Skin on Skin. They have never ever been able to send thoughts or influence us in any
way.”

  He glanced at each member of the section in turn, waiting for the next one to speak up. It was Private Fuller, which worried him, as she was the newest to the crew and very reluctant to ever contribute in their daily meetings. “It’s said that once every ten generations a Sender is born. What if there wasn’t one during the Wars, but there is now? It would be time for one. What if this whole integration scheme is nothing more than an excuse to get a Sender off the colony?”

  He studied her for a moment. She was compact and sturdy. She was also very competent. If he had to have someone watching his back, he’d have been willing for it to be her. Which in his world was a compliment of a pretty high order. Some of the others in the section, usually Holliday, occasionally muttered about her strange adherence to Old-Earth religion. Cal thought privately that whatever comfort she got from the tiny cross of silver around her neck, it gave him less trouble than the alcohol and sex most other people in deep space used to relieve stress. She was due a promotion, but it was dead man’s shoes in such a tiny security detail, and Holliday was currently very much alive—if hungover, as Cal suddenly noted with disgust, if the sour little man’s shaking hand and odd colour were anything to go by.

  He nodded at Fuller to let her know that he wasn’t annoyed by her contribution and asked softly, “Is that a common perception on board?” Fuller always listened more than she spoke and was often a very reliable gauge of what the undercurrents were in any situation.

  “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, but it is.”

  “Even if there were such a creature, and, believe me, it’s a myth, we will fit an inhibitor on them all and we have the Caripenidone as backup. That right, Holliday?”

  Holliday gave a furtive glance at the drug cabinet. “Fucking-A we do.”

  Cal waved his hand at Hunter before the 2IC picked Holliday up for insubordination and continued to address Fuller, still including them all with eye contact. “The machines cannot be fucked with and Senders don’t exist. It’s a story to scare children. Are you going to be scared?” He allowed one of his rare smiles to let them know that he was on their side and that some self-deprecating humour was allowed and then suddenly switched expressions and shouted, “Boo!” It was so sudden everyone jumped, even Hunter, but there was laughter almost immediately. “Happy Halloween, Private Fuller.”

  Her lip curled in wry amusement. The two other privates, who had been the first to laugh, mock-punched her arm as she muttered that Halloween was still a week away and that it was a godless, heathen debauchery, but she was smiling and fending off Sloane as she said it.

  Privates Manning and Sloane were typical young men given cool uniforms and weapons. Cal had worked with hundreds of soldiers like them in his time. They did their job; they did what Cal said when he said it, and if he asked them to jump, they asked how high on the way up. It was enough for them. Sometimes, he forgot which was which. They were in it for the uniform, the opportunity to go home and brag about non-existent heroism on fictional battlefields. They strutted and paraded and made a big deal of their duties on board a transport ship, living in their minds, he was sure, a better version of space travel, where they fought off intergalactic battle cruisers rather than Saturday night drunken Titan miners. He sometimes wondered what they would do if life on board the Elon Musk finally proved too boring for them. He suspected they’d probably enjoy it if the Minders did all break out of their mental restraints and run riot on the ship. He made a private note to ensure both men were off duty for the Halloween party, so they actually got to attend it. He grinned inwardly. Fuller could pull a double shift—she’d relish policing godless heathens.

  The atmosphere was cleared. Everyone looked alert and eager to get to work.

  Cal clenched his jaw. “Good. Now, if there are no more questions we’ll go over the plan.”

  §§§

  Despite his determined façade to his subordinates, Cal returned to his bunk that evening disquieted and unsettled.

  His room was cold, the mandated fall temperature for public areas, so he cranked it up to at home and removed his jacket. He’d spent three weeks now supporting and putting out the party line—a message he personally despised. He sometimes questioned whether he was the very best person to be selected for this mission or the very worst. He was possibly the one with the most secrets to lose to a mind reader if it all went pear-shaped. Perhaps that did make him the best then: he was personally invested in seeing the inhibitors work.

  He was restless again and decided to go to the gym for a run. He wasn’t surprised to find Hunter there already. He’d had a feeling the man had more questions but hadn’t wanted to ask them in front of the others. They were less formal with each other when alone, and Hunter nodded to him as he entered. “Boss.” He dropped the resistance band he was using for some bent-over rows and shifted over to one of the weight benches.

  Cal offered to spot for him, and Hunter accepted. They worked together harmoniously for a while, then Cal asked quietly, “Do you really believe that Sender shit Fuller brought up, Jim?”

  Hunter laughed. “Honestly? I don’t know whether I do or not. I can’t see how the War went on for so long and was so bloody destructive if the Minders were as limited as we’ve been told. Christ, Boss, they’ve been on that damn colony for over two hundred and fifty years—almost three hundred. All bloody inbreeding. Can you imagine Minder after Minder after Minder all producing little Minders that breed again?” He visibly shuddered. “Picture that gene pool. You boil a pot for long enough, you get a pretty rich mixture left. So, yeah, maybe I do believe in one of those super-Minder buggers existing.”

  It was a sobering thought. It led Cal down to the stores that night just to check the boxes one more time. They were the same as the last time he’d inspected them.

  Such a small solution for such a potentially huge problem.

  CHAPTER TWO

  They rendezvoused as planned with the small Martian-colony carrier transporting its fifteen passengers the following day. It manoeuvred into the hold as Cal and his team watched from observation. When fully pressurised, they made their way through the connecting tunnel to the ship.

  Hunter slapped the walls of the older vessel as they entered. “They gonna be able to adapt to life on our sexy lady? What about the gravity?”

  “The volunteers for the project came from the colony’s orbiting stations. They kept the same artificial gravity as us.”

  “Ah, the fluctuating kind then.”

  He heard a snort from Manning or Sloane, and was grateful for Hunter’s attempt to lighten the atmosphere. They were meeting humans, for Christ’s sake, ones whose ancestors had lived and breathed on Earth alongside theirs. But generations of myth and rumour and Hollywood fantasising had turned these ex-Earth dwellers into something beyond imagination. The favourite topic of inbreeding hadn’t helped. He was pretty sure he wasn’t the only one expecting to see two heads or maybe tails.

  The pretty, slim, tall young woman waiting for them in the otherwise deserted anteroom came as rather of a surprise to them all. Almost something of a let down. She nodded pleasantly at them and said wryly, “Ah, so the rumours aren’t true. You aren’t green.” Cal almost smiled, but he wasn’t feeling that generous. He gestured toward one of the chairs.

  “We’ll save introductions until later if you don’t mind. Let’s get this done.”

  She sat primly and folded her hands in her lap. “I’ve been told it doesn’t hurt.”

  “Yeah. We’ve all been told lots of things, I’m thinking.” Being very careful not to touch her skin, he fitted the device to her temple where it slotted permanently onto the implants she had already had fitted. They all stood back, waiting for something dramatic to happen. Cal waved his monitor over the disc and got a positive reading. “So?”

  She gave him a little look of reprimand. “I can’t tell until I test it, and I assume you are not volunteering to be touched? No. I didn’t think so. Can I go now?”

  Cal nodded toward
one of his team. “Go with Private Fuller, and she’ll take you to the med centre for some further checks and then to your cabin. Please stay in your quarters until you are escorted to the welcome ceremony.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  The next two Minders came in as a pair, which had been forbidden, but they were older and holding hands, so Cal let this early challenge to agreed protocols go. The woman was clearly nervous, staring mutely at her partner. Cal didn’t get the significance of this at first until the old man briefly shook his head at her, and Cal realised with a deep jolt of shock that through this mutual touch of hands they were saying goodbye to the life of the mind—that this would be the last time they could share such private communication. He looked away for a moment, unsure for the first time about what he was doing.

  Could he volunteer to be blinded? No—it was unthinkable. What had driven these people to make such a sacrifice? He shook himself lightly, indicated that they were to take separate chairs, and watched uneasily as their fingers slid reluctantly apart.

  When the old couple were done and being escorted by Manning and Holliday, silent and pale down the tunnel, Sloane said cheerfully, “You getting the feeling we’ve been worrying over nothing, sir?”

  Hunter replied for him with a wry lift of an eyebrow. “Isn’t that what God said to Michael just after they let Lucifer run a briefing on how to improve Heaven in five easy steps?”

  They heard the door open, and the next Minder entered.

  Cal felt something spark at the base of his spine as if he’d touched a charged surface. He glanced over at Hunter and Sloane, but they were preparing the next implant and didn’t appear to have sensed anything unusual. The Minder was as tall as the others had been but he had broad shoulders and a powerful physique. Cal would have guessed he was an athlete, if that hadn’t been ludicrous for a colonist on Mars. The man approached Cal and held out his hand, then smiled ruefully and withdrew the gesture with theatrical, mock embarrassment. Then he chuckled at his own joke. “Can we at least introduce ourselves before the castration?”