Bio-Weapon

Marten gestured farther down the corridor.

“Forbidden territory,” Omi said. “Yeah. Show me.”

2.

Both Marten and Omi found themselves aboard the Mercury Sun Works Factory through a complicated set of circumstances.

On 10 May 2350, the Genghis Khan and the Julius Caesar had entered the edge of Earth’s stratosphere. The two Doom Stars had annihilated the vast Social Unity sea and air armadas that had gone into action to help the beleaguered Japanese. Social Unity had sent up half of Earth’s space interceptors and launched swarms of merculite missiles against the Doom Stars. Then they’d fired the newly developed proton beams, a factor more deadly than the old military lasers. It had taken five HB asteroids plunging earthward to take out the five SU beam installations.

Unfortunately, powering the energy-hungry proton beams had taken the full output of five major cities’ deep- core mines. Such mines tapped the thermal power of the planet’s core.

To house Earth’s 40 billion citizens took cities that burrowed kilometers downward. Like bees, humanity survived in vast, underground hives. The asteroids had destroyed Greater Hong Kong, Manila, Beijing, Taipei and Vladivostok, and had thus slain a billion unfortunates.

Even so, Social Unity’s Military Arm came within a hair’s breath of destroying the Genghis Khan. As the Doom Stars were the bedrock of Highborn power, the Genghis Khan needed repairing. In the Solar System, only one place had the capacity to do so, the naval yards where they had been built: the Mercury Sun Works Factory.

The losses of Genghis Khan Personnel had sharply brought home to the Highborn their greatest weakness. They were only a couple million versus billons of Homo sapiens. So Highborn Command had pondered the idea of putting a complement of shock troopers aboard each ship. To the Highborn, the shock troopers were premen—Homo sapiens. The initial shock trooper test-run took place at the Sun Works Factory. The Highborn had combed the FEC divisions used in the Japan Campaign. FEC meant Free Earth Corps, and it was filled with humans the Highborn had convinced to fight for them instead of fighting for Social Unity. Marten and Omi had been in Japan because the Highborn had captured them in Sydney, Australian Sector and each had “volunteered” for military duty. Both had won decorations for bravery, the reason the Highborn had chosen them as shock troopers.

* * *

Marten and Omi headed into forbidden territory. Marten knew the way. He’d been here before, and in a certain sense he’d come home. Back in the days when Social Unity ran everything, his parents had been engineers on the Sun Works Factory. Long ago, there had been a labor strike, an attempt at unionization. Political Harmony Corps had brutally suppressed it. His parents and others had then escaped into the vast ring-factory.

Marten opened a hatch and stepped through, Omi followed.

Black and yellow lines painted on the ceiling, wall and floor warned them to stay out. Newly placed red posters with skulls and crossbones made it clear.

“Don’t worry,” Marten said. “I’ve already been here several times.”

They hurried. Sleep-time would soon be over and their maniple would return to training.

“This way,” Marten said. He wheeled a valve, grunted as he swung a heavy hatch and poked his shoulders through. The corridor was smaller here, colder.

“What’s that smell?” asked Omi.

“A leak lets in minute amounts of vacuum. The cold crystallizes the air, and that’s what you smell.”

“Are you sure we’re safe?”

“Here we are,” Marten said.

He led Omi to a small deck, with a bubble-dome where the wall should have been. A hiss came from four meters up the dome’s side.

“Air leaking out,” explained Marten, “but it’s only a pinprick.”

Omi squinted at the bubble-dome’s tiny fracture. “It’s not dangerous, right?”

“Not yet,” Marten said. He pointed outside at Mercury.

The ring-factory rotated around the planet just as Saturn’s rings did around Saturn. The factory’s rotation supplied pseudo-gravity. They presently faced away from the Sun, but the radiation and glare would have killed and blinded them except for the dampening devices and heavy sun-filters.

The dead, pockmarked planet filled over three-quarters of the view. Mercury wasn’t big as planets went. If the Earth were a baseball, Mercury would be a golf ball. It had a magnetic field one percent of Earth’s. A person weighing 100 pounds on Terra would weigh thirty-eight pounds on Mercury. The solar body it most resembled was the Moon. Just like the Lunar Planet, thousands of craters littered Mercury. Dominating the view below was the Caloris Basin, a mare or sea like those on the Moon. Instead of saltwater, however, well-baked dust filled the mares. The Caloris Basin was 1300 kilometers in diameter, on a planet only 4880 kilometers in diameter.

Marten pointed at the Sun Works Factory as it curved away from them—they were inside the fantastic structure. The curving space satellite seemed to go on forever, until it disappeared behind the planet. On the outer side of the factory, unseen from the viewing deck because the outside part faced the Sun, were huge solar panels that soaked up the fierce energy and fed it into waiting furnaces. Catapulted from Mercury came load after load of various ores.

“Look at that,” Omi said.

Far to the left sat the damaged Doom Star Genghis Khan. It was a huge warship kilometers spherical. Blue and red lights winked around it, sometimes dipping into it. They were repair pods. Some were automated robots and some were human-occupied pods.

Omi turned to Marten. “So how is standing here going to help us from getting gelded?”

“Look over there.”

Omi squinted and shook his head.

“There,” Marten said, pointing more emphatically. “See?”

“That pod?”

“Correct.”

A small, one-man pod floated about a hundred meters from the habitat’s inner surface. No lights winked from it. It sat there, seemingly dead, a simple ball with several arms controlled from within. There were welder arms, clamps and work lasers. Anyone sitting inside the pod could punch in a flight code. Particles of hydrogen would spray out the burner.

“What about it?” Omi asked.

“Remember how I told you I grew up here?”

Omi nodded.

“Well,” Marten said, “I bet most of my equipment—my family’s equipment—should still be intact. It was well hidden.”

“So?”

“So my family built an ultra-stealth pod to escape to the Jupiter Confederation.”

“PHC found it, you said, over four and half years ago.”

“I’m pretty sure they found it back then. But that doesn’t matter because I could build another one.”

“Impossible.”

Marten managed a smile. “You’re right. Let’s stay and get gelded.”

Omi paled. “How do you plan on going about this, a…?”

“I need a vacc suit,” Marten said. “So I can go outside and enter the pod.”

“Then?”