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Excerpt from “Distraction”
Manipulation is my specialty. I knew it had to be why they’d selected me for the job. I was excited. All the retraining had been worth it. In two days’ time I’d be part of a work team, headed into the Clancy quadrant.
I’d kept track of previous attempts by the Rafferty Group to establish mines on JA20. Rafferty Group was a company focused on energy acquisition and that planet was an outpost with ore deposits that promised considerable profit, but repeatedly the scouring teams sent there had been unsuccessful. It was an embarrassment to the board of directors, but more than that, the failures had begun to cause interest and attention in undesirable areas, threatening a funding cutoff by investors. This latest effort could well be the last and having a chance to be involved was too good for me to pass up.
“Why you?” my friend Hally had asked, with unreserved surprise, echoing the sentiments of a number of my fellow graduates, and I admitted to myself, if not to them, that I’d been surprised as well, until I learned the company wanted an expert to manipulate the graphic repros in old communications data. It was a world I understood—maybe the only one. Entering the digital compilations, doing the complex conversions—it was like sinking into a familiar, warm, certain space, a virtual world untouched by anyone except me. Still, I knew where Hally was coming from. I wasn’t known as a team player, and an exped like the one I was about to join required sharing time and information both, which made it all so curious. Every time I thought about that aspect I had the feeling I was Alice checking the next unknown in her Wonderland.
The RG-5 transport would depart in the pre-dawn hours from a point in the Mojave just northeast of Twenty-Nine Palms, near the site of old airbase ruins. I was scheduled to arrive at midnight. It had been a long time since I’d driven through the desert, though once it had meant home, and husband, and a child. A peculiar outbreak of flu had ended that eight years before, when the two-hundred-year-old remains of a plutonium dump site had been found under our town. But the virus that spread from it hadn’t affected me at all. Thinking about it, the old rage and bitterness entered in for a moment.
Moonlight covered the distant San Bernadino range. It lighted the brush and rocks on the plain with an odd, pale green hue that intensified the closer I got to the launch area. They had activated a force field and I knew they’d be stopping my advance soon.
A robotic guard materialized before me at almost the same time as the thought. It didn’t speak, just ran its monitor over the vehicle. Then it nodded and waved me on. Machines everywhere now that are useful for everything, I thought, except holding off mortality.
Crossing a series of small slopes in the valley, the road then veered to the west for another mile. I put on the MAWS they had given me to be able to detect the outlines of the subterranean fencing, impossible to see with the naked eye but as bright as day with the microwave scanner. It lay before me in a triangular depression, the actual destination lying on the second angle. Hardly had I stopped my jeep tracker when the ground opened and pulled me and the vehicle half a mile down. Not until the descent was finished was there any visible light, when the shaft opened into a large mirrored room where the rest of the crew had assembled. One person broke away from a cluster of people and came over to me as I got out of the jeep.
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Book categories: Science Fiction and Short Stories