The Slip: The Complete First Season Read online

  Gulping for breath, she tried to cry out as one of the men clamped her head still with his knees, vice-like. Ice-cold water drenched her face. The cloth clung even tighter; suffocating her, drowning her. She wanted to call out, she wanted to scream.

  “Please,” she sobbed, her voice muffled by the cloth. “Please.” She gasped for breath as the man tore the cloth from her face. She gagged and gulped and coughed, snot dripping from her nose, tears filling her eyes.

  “You will tell us about the slip,” insisted the second man.

  “I don’t know what you—”

  The cloth covered her face again. The cold water enveloped her. She tried to thrash and claw free as the pressure pushed down on her lungs, but the binds were tight.

  The cloth was lifted. She coughed. It was a painful cough, a cough that tore at her throat and burnt her lungs.

  “Okay, okay,” she spluttered. “I don’t know much, I was trying to find out, but—” Her body shook with a violent, involuntary seizure.

  “Go on,” whispered the first man when Chao-xing stopped shaking.

  “There’s something, I don’t know, not right with Lunar Band, it doesn’t make sense. It’s something to do with that,” she said. “I wanted to find out.” Water dripped down around her neck and soaked into her coveralls,

  “And?”

  Chao-xing sighed. “And what? That’s all I’ve got.”

  “You will tell us more,” said the second man.

  She shuddered as the wet cloth enclosed her face again, crushing her nose and blocking her airways. She kicked and thrashed against her binds as she strained to push herself free. Snot bubbled from her nostrils and her head thumped from within.

  “You will tell us what you were doing in the archives.” the second man said, pulling the cloth from her face.

  There was a loud crash from behind, then a series of dull thuds and pained grunts. Someone tore off her her blindfold. Her eyes adjusted to the dim blue light as her arms and legs were untied. A trio of masked men lay unconscious on the floor around her.

  “I knew you’d come,” she whispered.

  The Occulto, in region of Saturn

  Chao-xing sat up in her bunk. Her grey coveralls were clean and lay folded on a bedside table. She switched on her ceiling lamp and wrinkled her nose at the smell of her own sweat, sharp and acrid. Her quarters were cramped, with only enough room for a bunk and side-table.. The walls were the same dirty white as her bed sheets. The sliding door at the end of the bed hissed open.

  Armand leaned in her doorway with folded arms. He wore a black tunic of light fabric, grey leggings and sturdy boots. His hair was black and cropped short. His eyes looked tired.

  “How long have I been asleep?” Chao-xing asked.

  “I couldn't find the memory chip, did you have time to get anything useful?”

  She pulled the rough woollen blanket up over an exposed body and crossed her legs. “How long?” she repeated, glaring up at Armand.

  “Four, maybe five days. We need to know if your mission was worth it.”

  “It was.” She bit the swelling around her bottom lip and winced.

  He waited.

  “I got exactly what I was looking for.”

  He raised an eyebrow and sat at the end of the bunk. “Was it what we were hoping for?”

  “I've only looked at fragments, and they don't make a lot of sense without the patches, but I'm quite sure it's everything.”

  Armand nodded. “I went through your clothes and found nothing.”

  “I wish you hadn’t.” She frowned and cringed at the pain. Raising her hand to her face, she prodded the bruising around her left cheek, feeling the movement of the swelling beneath her skin.

  “What did you expect? You were out. I didn't know if you were going to wake up. You got a pretty nasty bump on the back of your head.”

  She drew a hand across an egg-sized bump bulging from the back of her head. “Do we know who they were?”

  “They could have been working for the Yao, but—” Armand shrugged and craned his neck to get a closer look at the back of her head. “You know, that bump was much bigger a few days ago.”

  A dull, dizzying pain spread through her body. Her head throbbed with every heartbeat. “Oh Armand, it was horrible,” she said. “I thought. For a moment—”

  “Focus Chao-xing, where did you put the data chip?”

  She opened her mouth wide and pointed inside. “As soon as I knew I was being tailed, I swallowed it,” she said, with a brief smile. “I need a drink. Will you get me some water?” She rubbed the back of her head again. “And some pain meds?”

  Armand got up and stepped out the room as Chao-xing held back sobs as flashes of being chased through Titan Orbiter flashed through her thoughts.

  She tried to push away the feelings of doubt and inadequacy, of weakness. To cave in during her first interrogation — she had convinced herself she was stronger than that. The sensation of being trapped, of being helpless, was flooding back. She looked down at her trembling hands and bit into her swollen lip, focusing on the pain until the flashes went away.

  Armand returned with a small cup. She took the water and he handed her a small vial of meds. “You okay?”

  She nodded. “Thanks.” Uncapping the tiny blue vial, she sniffed at its contents, acidic, chemical. She knocked the meds down her throat in one swig and followed it with a sip of water, the bitterness linger on her tongue. “I'll need to get some food in me if we're going to get this data chip out,” she said, wiping her mouth with a forearm. “Hopefully, it won't take too long to work through. Hope you're up for some digging.”

  “Oh,” said Armand.

  Chao-xing awoke with a start again. She sat upright in her bunk and stared at the bare walls, shaking away the sensation of drowning, of being held down and unable to breath. She shuddered.

  Reaching over to her side-table, she poured herself a cup of water from a glass jug. She took a sip and sighed.

  “Are you okay? You cried out.”

  She jerked around to see Armand leaning around her door, the dull blue glow from a light in the corridor casting him as a strange shadowy figure.

  “Yes—” She paused. “No.” She flopped onto her sheets and curled into a foetal position.

  The bunk dipped at the end as it took Armand's weight. He placed a hand against her hip. “Another bad dream?”

  She nodded. “I can’t shake what happened on Titan. It was horrible.”

  “They tortured you,” he said in an even tone. “Do you remember anything more? Any clues as to who it might have been?”

  She rolled over onto her front and leaned up on her elbows, resting her chin on cupped hands. “I don’t know. I know it can’t have been the Yao. It must have been a group with an interest in gaining information about the Yao.”

  “Well, that could have been anyone.”

  “Yes, but not just anyone.” She frowned as the pain returned to the back of her head. “It has to be a group with the resources to monitor and the inclination to...” She hesitated. “To do what they did to me — what I think they were going to do to me.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Honestly?” she sighed. “The Purdah come to mind.”

  Armand snorted. “I had nothing—”

  “I know it’s not you, but what about another Purdah cell not directly associated with what you’re doing?”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “I can’t see it though. They were too disciplined, and their equipment wasn’t anything I’ve seen before.”

  “Maybe it was United Solar?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t be naive — that’s not their style. They’d do everything through the Judiciary — give the appearance of a fair process.”

  She nodded and rolled onto her back. “You're right.”

  “There’s no way they’d be into torture. If they wanted to interrogate you, they’d most likely pump you full of Muedin drugs.”

  “S
peaking of meds, will you?”

  Chao-xing switched on the Occulto’s main terminal and listened to the satisfying hum as it ran through its boot sequences. She had never used a terminal like this one before, cobbled together as it was with mismatched hardware and cascading wires, its innards exposed as it bulged beyond the confines of its steel casing.

  “Do you think this will work?” asked Armand.

  “The chip will work fine,” she said. “I’m sure it will.”

  “And you cleaned it properly?” He grinned.

  “Yes!” She struck his shoulder with a playful shove. She took the tiny chip from a leather pouch in her pocket and inserted it into the terminal. Her eyes adjusted to the lines of monochrome code scrolling across the display. The smell of burnt plastic, solder and dust mingled with coffee and sweat as the terminal temperature rose.

  “It's a bit idiosyncratic, but I've got it so it can process coding from United Solar, Yao, Fune, Boeki, Aghoro, Bani, Muedin, and a good few hundred other protocols that probably haven’t been used for centuries,” Armand said. “It might be clunky, but if you’re going to retrieve the information you’re looking for, this is the system to use.”

  She sighed. “It will be difficult to process this raw data. With Yao systems, there's no interface — it’s just there.” She tapped her fingers on the arm of her chair as the terminal processed the chip, its innards whirring away as the air ducts hissed behind her.

  “This is taking a while. How much is on there?” asked Armand.

  “The entire archive. It dates back thousands of years.”

  “We should probably go and get something to eat then. This is clearly going to take some time.”

  Chao-xing shook her head. “I’ll wait.”

  Eyes pulsing and neck strained, Chao-xing worked through the thousands of documents. She traced the pattern of the Yao’s development back though time. The most recent files centred around gene recoding, meme splicing, consciousness and memory transfers. Many of the older files detailed biographies and cloning data dating back thousands of years. Wading through the redundant code and archaic languages, she noted the advances in technology and knowledge. The older files were written in an early dialect that required the patching of different translation ciphers to read.

  “This is fucking tedious,” she sighed. The process would have been much quicker had she accessed the archive using Yao implants instead of one the Purdah’s hacks.

  “This is why we need to make this available to everyone,” Armand said from behind his own terminal.

  “I’m not sure if this is correct, but I’m getting a lot of fragments about the slip in some of the older files The Lunar Band is a relatively new phenomenon according to this...” Her voice trailed off.

  She opened document and scrolled through a series of translation patches until the words made sense. “Look at this,” she said, highlighting a paragraph of text. Her eyes remained fixed on the display as Armand rose from his terminal to view her display.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “Have you ever heard of Earth?”

  There was a long silence. She turned to Armand. His expression was blank. “No.”

  The silence hung between them and she turned back to scan through the archive. “The trouble is with these files is they rely on a significant amount of assumed knowledge,” she said, massaging her temples. “Take this.” She highlighted a line of text.

  “As the Earth’s magma core was ejected, the magnetic and gravitational shifts caused instability in the crust and mantle,” Armand read aloud.

  “What the fuck are magma cores?”

  “You know. What if Earth was a planet? My father used to tell me stories about people all living on one planet. He said it explained why there were no planets without domes — we couldn’t have evolved on hostile planets like Mars or Lunar.”

  She pulled her eyes away from the screen. “Fuck, it makes sense. It all makes sense. The Lunar Band must have been a planet. This must be the slip.”

  Armand’s brow creased as he shook his head and sighed. “If this is true then we need to know.”

  “How?”

  “We go to the Lunar Band ourselves and investigate. If the Lunar Band is a natural phenomenon, then it’s likely to have similar characteristics to the Martian Band. But if we find evidence of something manmade — that way, we’ll know for sure.”

  Chao-xing swallowed. “Okay,” she said, “let’s go.”

  The Lunar Band

  “Can you imagine it?” Chao-xing said into her helmet's communicator as she gestured across the surface of an expansive asteroid. “Lakes, trees, mountains — you can almost picture them.”

  She bounced across the surface of the bare rock in her armoured vacuum suit, each step exaggerated by a slight blast from the suit’s propellant.

  “I don’t know,” said Armand, his voice crackling in her ears. “This looks like any other asteroid.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Let’s look at the next one.”

  The pair connected their suits together with a tether line and launched towards a larger rock.

  “How big do you reckon this one is?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure, fifty, maybe sixty kilometres across. It’s difficult to judge.”

  They sped along the Lunar Band as smaller rocks drifted and tumbled around them. “It looks pretty bare,” said Armand. “I’m starting to think this is a lost cause. Those documents might have been old stories — tales to scare children with.”

  “No, look.” She pointed at a series of deep vertical ditches, her wide-open mouth hidden by the reflective surface of her helmet’s visor. “They don’t look natural. See, look at this.” She detached the tether line and opened her propellant. “They’re perfectly straight. And look down there. Their bottoms are perpendicular.”

  She turned as Armand bounded over her and jumped into the nearest trench.

  “I’m still not convinced,” he said. “I agree they’re not naturally occurring, but this could have easily been done by mining drones.”

  She frowned as Armand flew out of the trench and hovered above her for several seconds. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Follow me.”

  She opened her propellant and followed Armand as he sped far above the landscape. He swooped down to the surface with an improbable jerk. She trailed his sudden descent. “What is it?”

  “Look.” He pointed at a rough line of bricks just poking through the rock's surface, approximately half-a-metre by ten metres. “This is your evidence.”

  She sensed the excitement in his voice and grinned.

  “These must have been the foundation for something,” he said. “They’re pretty worn down, but there’s no way these could be natural.”

  She crouched down and ran her hand over the rough line of bricks. “I can see it. Look, it’s like they’ve been joined with some kind of sealing agent.”

  “What do you suppose this is?” He leaped over to a crumbling rectangle of rusted iron screwed into the brickwork.

  “I’m shaking,” she said, bouncing after him. “This is something else.” She crouched down to examine the artifact. “I'm sure I saw something like this once in the Insularum Museum. I can’t remember what it was for — it’s quite ancient, though.”

  “It’s really quite crude, but it’s definitely machine-made. It might be some kind of hinge.”

  “You know what this means? Do you know what this is?”

  There's a long silence before Armand responds. “Earth.”

  Chao-xing continued her search of the rock, but found nothing else. She was desperate to find more evidence — something, anything else to prove the line of bricks were part of something more. “It’s so sad,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “This was our world... now look at it.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Oh, come on,” she sighed. “We live sealed up in domes and on orbiters, on platforms
and ships. We rely on machines and trade-lines to sustain us. This was our world, and we destroyed it.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes. I do.” Her eyes filled with tears, but she had no way of wiping them away.

  With their suits connected, she led Armand across the fragmentary remains of Earth. There were more foundations and a line of concrete that stretched far into the distance, curving with the changes in the landscape, cracked and mottled by time. There was an ancient steel frame, wilted and bent into itself, coated in a thick layer of dust and thin strands of silica.

  They rose over more fragments and moved further and further away from the Occulto, which was hovering a few hours away in a stationary orbit on the edge of the Lunar Band.

  “What are they?”

  Chao-xing moved to the edge of an enormous fragment and gasped. There was a group of around one hundred mining drones. “They’re fucking huge,” she whispered.

  “The drills must be at least five kilometres in diameter,” said Armand. “They’re insane.”

  Scanning the dull, metallic surfaces of the drones, she squinted at the glare of sunlight. The machines were dented and coated in dust.

  “I didn’t know anything about these,” she said.

  “They’re Yao, aren’t they?” He hover forward and reached out to touched a drill. A thick layer of dust became a cloud bobbing around his hands.

  “They couldn’t be anyone else’s, but I’ve never known Yao drones to be this big — or this crude.”

  “The only thing I can think is they're for mining large asteroids, moons, planets, perhaps,” Armand said. “You could gut a planet the size of Lunar in a few years with these.”

  Chao-xing blinked as a wave of sorrow passed through her. “I imagine something like that has already happened.”

  The Occulto, in region of Lunar

  “I fucking hate these archives,” said Chao-xing, smacking side of the terminal with the heel of her hand. “If I was using a Yao connection I wouldn’t even have to think about stuff.”