The Cage of Zeus Read online

  Looking down, he noticed the mountain of mangoes in the girl’s arms. He worried that he’d upset her, but she began to giggle. She giggled so hard it made him wonder what was so funny. He smiled sheepishly.

  The girl pointed to a tree farther away. “Can you climb that tree?” she asked. “Can you get that one?” He said, “Sure, I can,” and jumped off the wall onto the path with the girl. The girl’s hand clasped naturally in his felt soft.

  Suddenly Shirosaki was overcome with an aching sadness. He didn’t know whether he was feeling the ten-year-old’s intoxication or the sentimentality of a forty-year-old.

  The scene began to waver as if the signal were breaking up. The picture grew hazy.

  Shirosaki moaned, nauseated by the feeling of being torn away from the world. The smell of the vegetation and fruit quickly faded.

  Shogo Shirosaki lay inside the hibernation chamber and winced.

  His breathing was erratic. His heart raced. He wondered why the hibernation system had summoned this particular memory. Wasn’t it too sentimental to be used as a trigger to wake him? What was the point of rousing a space traveler’s nostalgia in this way?

  A yellow ambient light illuminated the chamber.

  Shirosaki steadied his breathing.

  The real world smelled faintly of his body odor and sterilized fabric. The smell of summer grass from his dream faded like a vision.

  Like a caterpillar, Shirosaki waited for the lid of the cocoon-shaped hibernation chamber to open automatically.

  Hibernating mammals have a gene that produces a hibernation-peculiar protein—HP—in the body. Human DNA contains a similar type of gene. By raising the HP level in the blood, humans can fall into a hibernatory state.

  The hibernation chamber maintained a passenger’s life functions during deep sleep. Required aboard all vessels capable of long-term trips, the system greatly reduced the amount of food and oxygen supplies needed for interplanetary voyages.

  As the scheduled passenger-waking day approached, the system injected the passenger with a shot to lower the HP level in the blood, stimulating the brain into wakefulness. This triggered a memory, facilitating the transition into the waking state. Although in Shirosaki’s case, it was not a terribly pleasant way to wake up.

  The lid opened, and Shirosaki sat up in the chamber.

  He grabbed hold of the edge with both hands and propelled himself out of the chamber with his arms and legs.

  The gravity onboard was maintained at zero so passengers wouldn’t feel the strain of locomotion after months of sleep.

  After passengers underwent about a week of rehabilitation to work the muscles back to their original strength, the gravity onboard was adjusted to 0.3 G, the same gravity as on Mars. Since all of the passengers on his voyage were from Mars, maintaining a 1.0 G environment wasn’t necessary.

  Shirosaki was a field officer of an antiterror unit assigned to the Special Security Division of the Mars Police Department. Though his usual duties entailed maintaining security on Mars, his team was occasionally loaned out for special extramartian missions. The security details on Asteroid City and on Jupiter-I were part of teleplanetary duty rotation for his team.

  Since none of the hibernation chambers containing the other members were open, Shirosaki checked the control panel. The display indicated he was the only one to have regained wakefulness.

  Maybe he had received an emergency message for his eyes only.

  Shirosaki slid into the seat in front of the terminal and activated the communications system. He entered his ID number to access the unread messages. There were two. One was a private transmission; the other contained orders addressed to the entire team.

  He opened the private transmission. The face of Special Security Division Captain Hasukawa appeared onscreen.

  “By the time you receive this transmission, you will be a week out of Jupiter-I. How are you feeling, Commander? I trust the hibernation chamber awakened you with a pleasant dream?”

  Hasukawa smiled amiably as if he were seeing the man he was addressing.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Shirosaki muttered.

  Although Hasukawa belonged to the Special Security Division, someone of his rank was rarely seen in the field. He would never make an appearance in the field on Mars, much less during a teleplanetary assignment. The figure of Hasukawa in a suit, leaning back in his chair, resembled a corporate manager more than a security officer. While Shirosaki certainly wasn’t envious, he was made to realize the gulf between his home on Mars and his current location all the more.

  “There’s been a change of plans. Rather than relieving the security team stationed on Jupiter-I, you’ll be joining their team to guard the space station. The security detail on the space station is being doubled. Do you understand what that means?”

  Shirosaki felt his entire body tense.

  Hasukawa continued:

  “We received a communiqué from a CIB operative that terrorists are planning an attack on Jupiter-I. Find them and neutralize the threat. No arrests. Take every last one of them out.”

  Shirosaki knitted his brows. He was a member of the special security unit, not the military. While he had the authority to kill in extreme cases, wouldn’t it be more prudent to make an arrest and try to extract more information about the group they were dealing with?

  “The terrorists call themselves the Vessel of Life. We believe they’re targeting the research facilities and the special district on Jupiter-I. We won’t get anywhere negotiating with them or learn anything by making an arrest. Your orders are to eliminate them.”

  Hasukawa leaned forward and seemed to look Shirosaki directly in the eye.

  “They’re spending a pretty penny to get to Jupiter, so they must believe they have a chance of succeeding. They shouldn’t pose too big of a threat considering their numbers, but be careful. Don’t let your guard down.”

  Shirosaki closed the message file and let out a sigh.

  He recalled what a colleague had told him before he left Mars.

  You can look at the blue of the earth all you want and there’s no harm in it. Whether you were born on the Moon or Mars, even if Earth is not your home planet, that blueness has the power to heal. There’s no explaining why. It arouses something instinctual in humans. It’s not exactly nostalgia but a kind of relief—that there is water on that planet—that soothes people’s souls. But you better not look too long at the face of Jupiter. You’ll go crazy if you stare at the Great Red Spot for too long. It’s the eye of God, the eye of Zeus—the eye of a supreme being sending us a warning, trying to break the will of humanity from venturing out into deep space.

  Being stationed on Jupiter-I had made Shirosaki’s colleague ill. Unable to bear the idle days in the space station where nothing ever happened, the officer broke down before his assignment had ended.

  As he stared at the Great Red Spot to help pass the time, he had become possessed by the eye of Jupiter.

  The Great Red Spot was an enormous cloud swirling in Jupiter’s atmosphere consisting of hydrogen and helium. The vortex was elliptical, measuring twelve thousand kilometers at its minor axis and twenty-five thousand kilometers at its major axis, making it large enough to consume two Earths. If you stared at it long enough, it might very well drive you mad.

  The size of Jupiter, to someone only familiar with Earth, the Moon, and Mars, was an imposing sight. The equatorial diameter of Jupiter was 142,984 kilometers; you could lay eleven planets the size of Earth on it from end to end.

  Jupiter. The planet named for the Roman version of the great god Zeus. This planet, shrouded in gasses and comprised of a rock core said to be about fifteen times the mass of Earth, completed one rotation in an astounding 9.925 hours, and ever threatened to swallow the space station and its residents with its sinister eye.

  Unless you were fascinated by astronomy, the scale of Jupiter was usually a source of stress for humans—a species just starting to venture out into deep space.

  In
addition, Jupiter produced an intense magnetic field and radiation waves. The magnetic field expanded to trap sixty-three satellites into its orbit and was twenty thousand times the intensity of Earth’s. The magnetic field contained high-energy particles, which emitted strong radio waves. One of Jupiter’s satellites, Io, continued to be the most geologically active in the solar system. Its volcanoes dispersed sulfur and other chemical substances into space, triggering electrical discharges of three million amps. This created a storm around Jupiter’s atmosphere, triggering an enormous aurora at Jupiter’s polar regions that could cover the span of three Earths.

  Were it not for the powerful defense mechanisms protecting spacecraft and the station, humans would die instantly in such an unforgiving environment. Without the medicines and metabolic molec machines to periodically restore their cells and DNA, humans would surely have a shorter life expectancy in the Jovian system.

  Shirosaki was also required to undergo this restoration treatment. The same went for the staff living on the three stations near Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. They were just barely able to survive, sufficiently shielded by all sorts of defensive measures and receiving the necessary preventative medicine.

  In the Jovian system, humans were like bacteria clinging to the tiniest puddle of moisture. But these bacteria had both skill and smarts. They were gradually expanding their habitat into the depths of space. While they were only able to reach Jupiter now, surely they would eventually see what was beyond the solar system.

  Shirosaki’s colleague had an outstanding service record on Mars. He had prided himself in running headfirst into danger. He was a hero who’d captured and disposed of countless terrorists and succeeded in carrying out death-defying rescue operations. He had thrived on defeating the enemy. But when he transferred to the security detail on Jupiter-I in the twilight of his career, he began to erode like a sand castle on the shore.

  Perhaps the toll of his aggressive approach to the job had finally caught up to him on Jupiter-I. He returned to Mars and immediately submitted his resignation. The man was forty-five. With a wife and kids. Now he had a sedentary job watching surveillance cameras in an office building in Cryse City.

  What about himself, Shirosaki wondered. Idle days on Jupiter-I. A security detail where nothing happened. Fine by him. As a matter of fact, he’d been looking for just that kind of place.

  Shirosaki had taken the job because the rotating assignment would eventually come around to him sooner or later. He was also becoming less enamored with going out in the field. He was growing tired of the routine of going in, taking control of the scene, and taking down the enemy. Since he’d chosen this job as his profession, he had no problem with going in to neutralize a threat with guns blazing. But the job did little more than treat the symptom. Unless society underwent some sort of drastic change, terrorism would continue to exist. It frustrated him to know that what was plainly obvious to everyone couldn’t be accomplished without the right people and government departments working to effect that change.

  They were only stalling for time. Unless something happened to transform society, the job would continue without end. But Shirosaki had misplaced his priorities.

  He had hoped going to Jupiter would offer him some relief. He knew he was running away. But he was also aware that running would be the best medicine for him now. Cushy assignment or not, he was still going to get paid. At forty, Shirosaki had a wife and child to look after, and without any commendations to speak of, he couldn’t very well resign. The Jupiter assignment was a godsend even if it meant spending months apart from his family.

  Of course, that had all been dependent on nothing happening on Jupiter-I. It was a moot point now that he was likely to see action there.

  One by one, the members of Shirosaki’s team began to wake from the hibernation chambers. Shirosaki played Hasukawa’s message intended for his team on the ship’s screen.

  The message’s tone had been calculated to neither flame their fears nor put them on edge, but to rally and boost the team’s morale. Nevertheless, the nineteen members instantly sensed the gravity of Hasukawa’s message. The mood grew tense, as though they might draw their guns at any moment.

  Shirosaki assured the team that they would not see action very soon after they arrived, and that as this was a joint mission, they had more than enough manpower to overwhelm the attackers. They were to recondition their bodies back to full strength before docking at Jupiter-I. Shirosaki told them that he would have more concrete directions after meeting with the supervisors of the station. Then he dismissed the staff. As the security members dispersed throughout the ship to begin their reconditioning, Shirosaki called over his second-in-command Naoki Arino and discussed plans for their arrival.

  A week later, the ship carrying the relief team arrived at Station No. 1 Jupiter-I.

  Jupiter-I was a cylindrical space station on one of the Jupiter-Europa Lagrange points. Its center was hollow, much like a pineapple after being cored.

  The station was three hundred meters in diameter and eight hundred meters long. A central axis, running straight through the hollow center, housed the gravitational control system. The axis rotated the alloy pineapple-shaped station, creating a 0.3 G atmosphere in the residential district.

  The central axis was connected to the outer shell by a series of spokelike support shafts, inside of which were high-velocity elevators running at a thousand meters per minute. A separate network of elevators running along the length of the outer shell was used to travel from one end of the space station to the other.

  The central axis, which was longer than the space station itself, protruded at one end. The docking bays were located there. All vessels entered the cylindrical structure at the tip of the axis and were required to pass a security check. Anything suspicious, and the passengers were forbidden to disembark. If everything turned up green, on the other hand, they proceeded from the docking bays to the corridor where one of the high-velocity elevators carried them away to the residential district. Unmanned vessels were transported by an automated system from the docking bays to a designated mooring inside the core.

  The docking bays were kept apart from the rest of the station as a safety precaution against collisions. The docking bays had been designed to disconnect from the rest of the station in the event of a fire or explosion caused by a docking accident. In this way, the protruding tip of the axis was like a lizard’s tail, able to be cut away from the body by disengaging the lock.

  Of course, this was also one of several measures to protect the station from terrorist attacks. Even if an explosives-laden vessel were to enter, the docking bays would be separated in order to protect the residential district.

  Upon entering the docking bay, Shirosaki’s vessel passed through security, and they were authorized to disembark. Shirosaki and the nineteen security personnel under his command proceeded through the double doors and down the corridor, and boarded the elevators leading up to the central axis.

  Once there, they boarded another elevator traveling through the support shaft and arrived at the entrance of the residential district in about five to six minutes.

  Standing at the entrance of the residential district, which was maintained at 0.3 G, were three men and a woman.

  The woman, who appeared to be in her late forties, lithely stepped forward and spoke in English. “Welcome to Jupiter-I. I’m Liezel Kline, the supervisor of Jupiter-I.”

  Shirosaki shook her hand and introduced himself as the commander of the relief team.

  Kline smiled. “We can use all the help you can give. We’re grateful you’re here.”

  A man older than Kline spoke next. “Dan Preda, assistant supervisor.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Shirosaki. He proceeded to explain that his team would be procuring their food and oxygen from the stores that had been brought with them to resupply the space station. But he assured them that a supply vessel had left Mars soon after these orders had been handed down and
would arrive before the station’s supply was exhausted.

  Preda nodded. “No worries, we always keep a reserve supply on hand.”

  A man about Shirosaki’s age came forward next. He was wearing the special security uniform. He shook Shirosaki’s hand, stone-faced. “Commander Jeff Harding. If it weren’t for these damn threats, my team would be back home on Mars by now.”

  The man standing next to Harding also held out a hand and flashed a smile. “Sub-commander Larry Miles. Nice to meet you.”

  Since the cargo had automatically been unloaded and transported to the residential district, Shirosaki ordered the team to deliver the cargo to the appropriate destinations. With his sub-commander Arino in tow, Shirosaki followed Kline and the rest of the welcome party to the meeting room.

  When they arrived, another staff member was waiting for Shirosaki.

  The figure that stood before him was in eir early thirties with spindly arms and legs and slight features. Eir silken hair, cut evenly at the chin, shone as it moved. Although difficult to guess eir ethnic origin and not exactly beautiful, ey had strangely magnetic eyes.

  “My name is Tei,” ey said. “My people don’t use family names, so please call me by my given name. Or Doctor, if you prefer. I’m in charge of medical matters on the station.”

  Shirosaki exchanged greetings with the doctor, despite wondering what a doctor was doing at a strategy meeting.

  “A female doctor,” Arino said, cracking a smile. “Nice to see I’ll be in good hands if I’m wounded.”

  A faint smile came across Tei’s pink lips. Shirosaki moved to caution Arino, sensing that the smile on the doctor’s face was one of cynicism rather than delight, but Tei spoke first. “I’m not a woman, Sub-commander Arino.”

  Arino’s cheek twitched. “My apologies.”

  “And incidentally, I’m not a man either,” Tei added. “I’m a human from the special district that you’ve come to guard. I’ve come as a representative of the special district.”