Читать книгу Moonsteed - Manda Benson - Страница 6

Chapter 2

Another horse poked its head over a door as Verity led hers into the stables. Its nostrils flared and its upper lip pulled back over its teeth and, as it exhaled a great moist gust into Verity’s face, she sensed an urge and a broadcast of frustration. It was a male horse, a stallion. The other horses were all mares, although Verity never really thought of them as having a sex when she worked with them. The stallion must have been brought in on the recent shuttle.

A nervous worry had begun to cramp up inside her. The ANT still returned negative when she requested the whereabouts of Private Aaron. What if he hadn’t gone back to the base as she had ordered, but had gone somewhere else? It had already occurred to her he might have something to do with the spy, and the spy must have been going somewhere, and what if Aaron had known about it and had gone there? Perhaps she had made the wrong decision. Verity made a request through the ANT to Commodore Smith, asking to speak with him as soon as possible.

She led the mare past the stallion and into her loose box before divesting herself of her helmet, sweaty jacket and gloves. The mare nudged a panel at the back of the stall and water poured into the bucket fixed there. Verity quickly removed the bridle so the horse could drink freely. She soon had the saddle and the rest of the armor off, and hung them on the door to the stall. The ice on the horse’s coat had already melted, leaving the hair damp, so she rubbed vigorously with a stable blanket to dry it off and stimulate its circulation. She checked the diagnostics from the connection: horse was uninjured, heart rate and breathing slightly increased from the exercise, and horse was happy to be home and have its armor off and be rubbed down.

Verity selected a spanner from its place on the wall ledge outside the stalls, and gave the command for the horse to pick up its foot. They always liked it when their shoes were taken off. As she cradled the hoof in her hand and bent over, something in the horse’s vision caught her attention. She put down the foot and looked up to see a young man enter, the same one she had run the horse into in the corridor.

He looked at her and looked away to stare at the horse. “Hi.”

Had he come in here looking for an apology? Verity wasn’t going to apologize to him. He should have got out of the way. In the horse’s vision, his skin looked greenish, because horses can’t see red, but even in Verity’s own eyesight he looked sickly and nauseous.

She stared at him. “I’m busy.” She turned back to the horse, but its eyesight confirmed he was still standing there, watching her. Couldn’t he take a hint? Didn’t he have work to do like everyone else on this base?

“It’s Zeta, isn’t it?”

The memory of what had happened outside flashed before Verity. How did this man know that? Who was he, and what was he doing here? Her hand gripped the hilt of her katana. “Don’t call me that!” The ears of every horse in the stable block turned back, hooves stamped and Verity’s horse let out a whinny. “No one calls me that! You understand?”

“I–I’m sorry... I looked you up in the staff directory. I was told you were the person I needed to speak to... I understood that was your name.”

“My name’s Sergeant Verity!” Verity’s hand still rested on her katana, but the slight pressure of her fingers brought back not the steady glide of steel in the sheath, but a sticky, viscous resistance. Too late she remembered the blood. “Shite!” She would have to deal with that later. Verity tried to control her temper, transmitting soothing thoughts to the horse, who snorted and moved uneasily as she lifted its foot to remove the shoe.

The man flinched at the expletive. “I was told you were the best person to approach on the matter of the horses. My name’s Vladimir Bolokhovski.” It was only after speaking a longer sentence like this when Verity noticed his slight accent.

“Look, I’ve told you I’m busy. If you’re a civilian, you’re not supposed to be in the stable block at any rate.” Verity wished he would go away. The bleed-back from her anger affected the horses, and he was making it worse. She unlocked the bolts securing the shoe to the bone implants and separated the inner cushion from the thick protective outer, its surface scalloped for grip and patterned with the holes of the retracted crampons. “You need to see Commodore Smith if you need access to the horses.”

“I already did. He told me to speak to you.”

Verity looked over her shoulder at him, narrowing her eyes as she stroked the powerful black neck of the horse. “What for? He knows I’m busy.” She ducked under the horse’s neck and went between it and the wall to take the shoes off the other side.

Vladimir put his hands on his knees and craned his neck forward, trying to look under the horse at her. “I’m writing a thesis.”

Verity grimaced. Was he trying to impress her? “What’s that make you, a not-properly-a-doctor?”

“I’m working in the research group of Professor Eglin at Torrmede.”

“Torrmede? Didn’t think they let foreigners into Torrmede.”

“I’m not foreign. I’m half-British. And Torrmede aren’t racist. They’ll let in anyone with the grades.”

“What did you study there? Spying, poisoning or nuclear weapons?”

The horse’s vision showed Vladimir straighten and make a distasteful face. “Russia hasn’t been communist since the late twentieth century, and we’re starting to adopt meritocratic rule.”

“Starting?”

“We have public referenda on many political decisions. A democratically elected government still makes some of them, but we’re gradually moving toward meritocratic autonomy.”

Verity scowled. “No country under the yoke of politicians can be called a meritocracy. If your country was worth the soil it was made of, its electorate would make all its decisions.”

“Hmm, wise words,” said Vladimir quietly, “yet I’d say that wisdom was beyond your years, and I recall once reading something attributing a very similar comment to Jananin Blake.”

Verity squeezed between the horse’s rump and the wall with the shoes in her hands. “Well, I think I can be forgiven for stealing Blake’s words. After all, she was Blake.”

As the horse pawed the ground, enjoying the light weight of its feet and the sensation of the layer of warm sand on the floor, Verity put the shoes in the storage rack opposite and lifted the saddle. The metal edge on the outer part of one of the stirrups caught the light, sending a bright reflective rectangle flitting about the roof of the stalls. The stallion’s eyes rolled. His nostrils flared and he backed away from the stall door with a snort.

Verity stared at the stallion. “He’s afraid. He’s not fearless?” She dumped the saddle on the rack.

“You don’t mix testosterone with fearlessness.”

Apparently satisfied that the threat posed by shiny things was gone, the stallion stretched his neck over the door of his stall to smell Vladimir. The man took a step out of the way. He didn’t look as if he’d seen very much in the way of either horses or testosterone.

“What do you know about it?” Verity scowled at him.

“That’s what my thesis is about.” He raised his voice at the end of the statement, making it sound like a question. “I’m doing a doctorate in genetic engineering. I engineered this horse.”

“Oh,” said Verity after a pause in which things started to make sense. “Well, congratulations. He’s a nice animal. Apart from being frightened of tack.”

“That’s why I need to talk to you. There’s supposed to be a breeding program commencing at this base.”

Verity picked up her armor, closed the stall door and reached up to the implant on her forehead, cutting her connection to the horse. “You’re going to have to speak to me later. I have a meeting with the Commodore.”

* * * *

In Verity’s billet, she threw the armor on the bed and examined the katana, swearing at the blood smeared up the blade and inside the sheath. She rinsed out the sheath and dumped it in the bath before wiping the blade carefully and polishing it. She laid it down on the floor close to the wall before stripping off the rest of her armor and throwing that on the bed and pulling on the charcoal boiler suit that was standard indoor dress on the Callisto base.

She exited her quarters and walked straight into the Commodore.

“Ah, Sergeant Verity. I understand you want to speak to me?”

“Yes, Commodore, Sir.” Verity stepped back from him in a hurry. “There’s been an incident involving Private Aaron. I think he might have absconded.”

Verity had never seen Commodore Smith smile, but he raised his eyebrows and turned his dark-brown eyes to her. “I had a quick read through the ANT’s details on the matter. Let’s discuss this in my office.”

In the Commodore’s office, Verity took a seat on the outside of the desk.

“Well,” said Commodore Smith, sitting. “Can you go through what happened? I’m going to need your account for the report.”

Verity hesitated. If she had made a bad decision, she could be court-martialed. She carefully explained the horse chase, how she had shouted twice for the spy to stop, how he’d reached for a weapon, and how she’d beheaded him, how Aaron had got hold of her katana–and at this point, she noticed the Commodore cast his eyes down to her belt to check she didn’t have it–and how she had overcome him but sent him back with the horse because of the necessity to return the spy’s head as quickly as possible.

Smith frowned, fingering his upper lip. “Did he say anything when he attacked you?”

“Uh,” said Verity. She didn’t have to tell him the exact circumstances of her birth. The Meritocracy made that information private from employers, so people with powerful relatives couldn’t exploit their connections. “He’d found out someone who was my ancestor had done something he didn’t agree with. He thought killing me would avenge a crime he thought had been committed against him.”

The Commodore grimaced. “Sounds like he was psychologically disturbed. That should have showed up in his screening.”

“Do you know where he might have gone, Sir?” Anxiety crept back into Verity’s stomach.

“If he’s not back, I don’t know what’s happened to him. The ANT can’t find him, so he mustn’t have left the scarp. It’s quite probable he could have fallen off the horse and killed himself, with no interface. Perhaps even deliberately after he realized he’d dishonored himself.”

“I doubt it,” said Verity, thinking privately that John Aaron didn’t have any honor. “You don’t think he could have gone anywhere?”

He shrugged. “Where?”

She considered. “There’s no proper GPS for getting detailed surveillance beyond the base. He could have had an ally put a ship down. The spy took the horse and he was going somewhere. He presumably got his information from someone. It might be John Aaron was an inside informant.”

Smith shook his head. “Unlikely, but it bears consideration. I’ve no idea how the spy got in here. The ANT reported unauthorized personnel, but we recently had a shipment of goods and a staff change, so it’s most likely he found a way to stow away on that. It is an awfully long way to come to Callisto to steal something, and rather expensive using one’s own transport. Possibly the spy panicked when the alarm went off, and took a horse in some kind of desperate hope, thinking he might be able to hide outside.”

Verity thought that seemed a bit of a stupid thing for a spy to do, but then she also thought it was stupid of the spy to have reached for a weapon when she had told him twice to stop. It could be he was merely a very inept spy. She said nothing.

“I’ll need to speak to Inquisitor Farron about the spy.” The Commodore’s face gave a slight twitch when he spoke Farron’s name, and his tone changed slightly. “It makes sense to ask him if he knows anything about Private Aaron while we’re there but, before we go, there’s another matter I need to discuss with you. There’s a breeding program commencing involving the base’s horses. Torrmede have sent someone to oversee it, some sort of scientist.”

“Vladimir Bolokhovski.” Verity pulled the name off the ANT. “He was hanging around the stable block earlier.”

“Yes. I’d like you to introduce him to the facilities here, and make sure he knows what he’s doing with this breeding program.”

“But, Sir,” she said, “it’s Referendum Day! I’m supposed to get the afternoon off so I can read and vote.”

“Sergeant Verity, I am not suggesting you have to do it this afternoon. I meant for you to arrange with him to do it in your own time.”

Verity protested, “I’m looking after the core-sampling project already. Sergeant Black’s better at this sort of thing than I am. She harps on about it enough. Why don’t you ask her to do it?” Verity frowned. “Has Sergeant Black been saying things about me?”

“Verity, we are not discussing Sergeant Black’s profile of abilities, we are discussing yours. I’m aware you have recently been involved in an incident, but may I remind you that you are a sergeant in the Sky Forces, and while this particular branch of the Sky Forces is not a true military division, you are still expected to conduct yourself in the proper manner!”

Something in Smith’s posture and parlance told Verity her suspicion was correct. Sergeant Black had never liked Verity, since even before Callisto. When she’d confided on the matter to Gecko, he’d thought it was because Verity was younger than Black, and Black envied her Magnolia Order connection. Her enmity had worsened when Verity was promoted to sergeant only a month after Black, who was five years Verity’s senior. Furiously, Verity wondered why, if Black had a problem with her, she couldn’t say it to her face. Backstabbing arse-licker!

“Do you think it is acceptable, just because certain aspects of your career profile are very strong, that you should neglect other parts of it?”

Verity folded her arms. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t be disingenuous! You weren’t promoted to sergeant for nothing, but it certainly wasn’t your interpersonal skills that put you in line for it. Now, if you are at all concerned about what I am going to write on my report about this incident, you can put those concerns out of your mind. I’m convinced you acted in a manner that was absolutely judicious and rational, and your training has served you extremely well today. Had you contacted me through the ANT and asked me what to do, I would have told you to do exactly as you did. Only you didn’t, quite rightly, because you knew explaining the situation to me would cost you time you needed, and so you made the decisions yourself, and they were the right ones.”

Smith paused to give Verity some time to consider this before continuing. “Now, your most recent appraisal shows that your interpersonal skills need work. This is one of two reasons why I’ve decided to give this duty to you. If you want to know my other reason, it’s because I honestly think you are the best member of staff here in terms of handling the horses. Certainly Sergeant Black and I are trained to use them, and do so effectively, but you understand them. Surely you can see that the best person to train someone how to handle horses is such a person who understands them thus?”

Verity took her gaze away from his face and stared at the surface of the desk. “I suppose so, Sir.”

“Good, then. Let’s go to the Inquisitor’s laboratory.”

* * * *

The Inquisitor greeted them in the entrance to his laboratory. Lloyd Farron had wavy hair with a tawny, auburn color, extending into luxuriant full-length sideburns. With his sturdy, medium-height build, he looked like a lion. He had a mug of tea in one hand and a chocolate biscuit in the other.

“Morning, Commodore. Sergeant Verity.” Lloyd glanced sideways at Verity and smiled, one eyebrow twisting below his interface apparatus. In addition to the standard fixed neural shunt in the center of the forehead, the Inquisitor had two auxiliary shunts just forward of his temples with a web of diodes and extra wiring interconnecting all three, supposedly to shield his mind from bleed-back off the people he interrogated. Verity doubted the efficacy of those, and there had to be some truth somewhere at the root of the rumor of the inquisitors’ compromised sanity. No one can dodge bleed-back, same as you can’t evade age and death. A hundred years ago, people used to say “death and taxes,” but that no longer worked since the Meritocracy made paying taxes an optional privilege. Perhaps one day scientists would find a cure for ageing, and then there’d only be bleed-back and death left. Verity couldn’t see death ever going away. Probability always wins in the end.

“Indeed it is morning,” said Commodore Smith, his attention drawn to the windows running the span of the outer wall, where a pale glow lightened the horizon.

“For the next four days,” said Verity.

Lloyd rubbed his hands together briskly. “Good Referendum Day. Was there something you wanted to speak to me about?” He glanced rapidly back and forth between Verity and the Commodore.

“Yes.” Smith fidgeted with his fingers. Tall and sable-haired, he looked very different to Lloyd. Verity could see the discomfort written on his face. People feared a man like Lloyd Farron, who could prize open someone’s mind at will. Verity, on the other hand, had from her first encounter with him seen it as something enticing, something dangerously exhilarating.

“I’ll need your report on the spy Verity terminated,” Smith said.

“I don’t have the information yet. It shouldn’t take more than a day. I’ll file a private report on the ANT once I’m sure I’ve extracted everything.”

Verity had been looking round the lab while they spoke, at the computers and the interrogation chair with its thick straps to restrain the arms and heads of Lloyd Farron’s subjects. In the far corner a lot of machinery had been connected to something Verity realized, with a pang of dread, was the head of the spy she had brought back, mounted on a stick like some grisly trophy. The long hair had been hacked off with scissors, and the face was covered with lacerations from Verity’s makeshift ice pack. The wound at the neck she had made with her katana looked unnaturally straight, perfectly horizontal, and thick tubes delivering oxygenated reanimation fluid had been clamped to its blood vessels. Wires trailed over the table around the head and jacks had been plugged into the shunt on its forehead. Saliva dribbled constantly from the mouth, and the left eye was a mess of clotted blood where a shard of ice had punctured it. The right eye swiveled, looked directly at her, and a chill prickling crawled from her scalp right the way down to the back of her knees. She’d done that...he’d made her do that. Why hadn’t he stopped when she’d told him?

The Commodore must have noticed the spy’s head also, for a slight noise of disgust escaped him. Verity turned and saw him staring at the head. “You’re not going to leave him like that, are you?”

“No.” The Inquisitor dipped his biscuit in his tea. “He’ll be put out of his misery once he divulges the information I need from him.” The biscuit broke as he lifted his hand, plopping into the tea. He made a distasteful face at the stub between his finger and thumb.

The Commodore took a deep breath and straightened his belt. “You see that you do your job and make him. He may be a spy, but...well.”

Verity stared at the head. Yes, he’d been a spy. She needed to rise above pitying him, thinking of him as a man, even, because he was a traitor to the Meritocracy, and this was what people who plotted to bring down the Meritocracy deserved.

Commodore Smith cleared his throat and looked conspicuously away from the head. “Do you know anything of Private John Aaron? I don’t know if you will know the name. If you’ve seen him about before, have you ever picked up any...vibes from him?”

“Hmm, Aaron.” The Inquisitor dipped another biscuit in his tea and put it in his mouth. He frowned as he chewed, turning away slightly and putting his fingers to his interface. “I think I know the one you mean. He had something he didn’t want others to know. He was very...assured in his convictions on a particular matter, although I’m not sure what it was.”

“That would fit. It turns out he’s some kind of religious extremist. He just made an attempt on Verity’s life and now he’s AWOL.”

“Hmm,” said the Inquisitor again. He glanced up at Verity. “Didn’t hurt you, did he?”

Verity shook her head. Lloyd suddenly grinned. “Didn’t think he could. Ah well, absit omen.”

“Well, if you have any information, please put it on the ANT.” The Commodore turned to leave. Something in his manner betrayed an eagerness to be elsewhere. Verity could tell he didn’t like the Inquisitor.

After Smith had left, Lloyd said, “Who was that man you were speaking with in the stables, Verity? Did he come in on the last landing?”

“He is a nearly-a-doctor who sires horses,” said Verity.

Lloyd roared with laughter. He offered her his tin of chocolate biscuits.

Verity didn’t want to eat them in front of the spy’s head, so she put them in her pocket.

“How do you mean?” Lloyd asked.

“He says he’s training to be a genetic engineer.”

“Hmm.” Lloyd tapped his signet ring against his tea mug. It was an odd design, titanium with alternating bands of anodized violet.

“Lloyd,” said Verity, admiring the strong shape of his brow and nose, and his broad shoulders. She never could think of what to say to him on that front. It wasn’t that he was older, because he couldn’t be more than ten years away from her, but because he was so much more senior. It always felt inappropriate somehow. “When you get the data off the spy, I know you can’t tell me what it is, but if there’s anything I need to know...” Verity found her gaze once more drawn to the head on the bench, where it watched her with an eye that looked somehow furious. “You will tell me? There’s something going on here, something to do with John Aaron. I tried to tell the Commodore, but I don’t think he really understood.”

She didn’t want to reveal any more of her thoughts in front of the spy’s head. He couldn’t speak, but he must still be able to hear.

“Of course,” said Lloyd.

* * * *

In the refectory she found Vladimir, sitting at a table by himself.

She sat unceremoniously on a chair opposite him. “I think you’re a waste of my time, but the Commodore says I’ve to help you.”

“Thanks...” said Vladimir. “I think.”

Verity ripped open the top of her carton of food and stuck her spoon in. “I’ll show you the exercise centrifuge tomorrow. We can’t use it this afternoon because it’s Referendum Day today.”

Vladimir made a pious face. “I don’t care about things like that. There’s work and more important things to be getting on with.”

Verity stared at him across the table. He had a very fair complexion with light brown hair and eyes of that genuine blue resulting from no iris pigmentation. It occurred to her that with his broad shoulders, he would have been conventionally very attractive if he’d bothered to care about such things. “Ya. Right. Well, if you don’t exercise here, you’ll waste away in the low gravity. And you’ll have to exercise your horse too. I’ve never put a horse that’s not fearless in a centrifuge before. Should be interesting, at any rate.”

Vladimir looked alarmed. “I have to handle him? There’s not staff here trained in it?”

“The staff here look after the working horses. He’s your project. You are in charge of him.”

He looked out the panoramic window at the sun on the horizon, and Jupiter in the sky. “When you say tomorrow, do you mean twenty-four hours-ish from now, or the next time the sun rises?”

“I mean Terran standard time.”

“It might have to wait longer than that. I think I caught some sort of cold on the transport ship, and now I don’t feel at all well.”

“It’s like snot and crap and you feel like shit?” Verity stirred her food. “It’s a reaction to no gravity. All the fluid in your lungs and sinuses comes out of place and it feels like a cold. The other thing’s breathlessness and feeling tired? That’s because the air out here is less oxygenated. It’s like high-altitude air when you go up Olympus Mons.”

“I’ve never been up Olympus Mons,” said Vladimir. He stirred his soup, looking away from Verity in an embarrassed sort of way. When he put his spoon in his mouth, his face crumpled. “This soup is awful! It’s like something I’d use in the lab! What is this stuff?” Vladimir rotated the container in his hands and frowned as he read the label printed on the white carton in plain black font. “Levigated esculents? It even sounds like something that belongs in a lab!”

“It’s made out of genetically modified plants grown on sewage,” said Verity.

“Tastes it.”

“We have to have sustainable food. It would cost a fortune to keep shipping in proper food from Earth or Mars. Well, although they make an exception for the Inquisitor. He gets tea and complimentary biscuits.” Verity remembered the biscuits and put her hand in her pocket to find it full of melted chocolate, much to her annoyance. She held up her hand, spreading brown-smeared fingers. Vladimir glanced at her and made a face of mock disgust.

“Don’t you ever miss proper food?” he asked as Verity licked her hand.

“What, like bloody steaks, sheep’s hearts and liver? Ya, I miss those.”

Vladimir shrugged. “The kebabs on Mars are the best. Don’t think they deliver out here, though.”

Verity hadn’t expected him to say that. He looked like the sort of person who didn’t eat meat. “Kebabs aren’t proper meat. It’s just processed rubbish.”

Vladimir leaned back on his chair and said, “What other animals have you eaten–I mean, worked with? Besides horses.”

Verity tilted her food carton and scraped the remainder into her spoon. “Birds.”

“Birds?”

“Hawks. The Meritocracy uses them for surveillance. They can see in much more detail than people or computers can, and they’re tetrachromats, so they can see into the ultraviolet region.”

Vladimir tore his bread open and poked at a packet of synthetic butter with his knife. “What things are ultraviolet?”

“Stuff like flowers. People’s hair and fingernails, that greasy area on people’s foreheads and noses. Urine.”

“Urine?”

“When buzzards and things are flying around, they can see places mice have piddled. That’s how they know where to look.”

“What does ultraviolet look like?”

“I dunno.” Verity shrugged. “Can’t explain it.”

Vladimir frowned. “Does it look like blue?”

“No. It sort of merges into it, though. Like how green merges into blue going the other way. You see it with the bird’s eyes, not your own. I can’t explain it in terms of how humans see. Same as you can’t explain to a horse what red looks like.”

“Are hawks better than horses to interface with, then?”

Verity sniffed. “When they first give you it, you think it’s really ace, but after you’ve had it for a bit you realize it doesn’t do anything else, and you can’t really train it much. All you can do is tell it where to go and analyze what it sees. Dogs are kind of annoying too.”

“I like dogs.”

“Thing with dogs is, they always think they’re starving even when they’re not. And then you’re always having to factor in smells. If you’re working with dogs and something smells, it hijacks their attention and they won’t stop thinking about it, and the worst thing is you get bleed-back.”

“Bleed-back?”

“The dogs’ impatience and distractedness get transmitted to you through the interface.” Verity tapped the implant on her forehead. “One time a fox or something had shat in the grass and my dog smelled it and tried to eat it, and for a moment I felt like I wanted to eat it too. Was disgusting.”

Vladimir grimaced and touched his own implant.

“And then there were cephalopods,” Verity said. “They were experimental. Didn’t work so well.”

“Cephalopods? How don’t they work?”

“They might work, eventually. They’re useful underwater because they’re intelligent and dexterous.” Verity opened and closed her fingers in a way suggesting tentacles. “I think it was just because they’re so different to us in terms of how their brains work. They’re a long way from us on those evolutionary diagrams biologists do.”

“They’re in a different phylum.”

Verity frowned. “Whatever they are.” She drained her glass of water, and rose. Vladimir pushed back his chair and stood too.

“I suppose I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” He followed Verity as she headed for the main doors.

“At the centrifuge, at eight.”

Sheets of paper and graffiti covered the wall of the mezzanine. One poster showed a holograph of a middle-aged man with spectacles and a ginger beard. That was Sidney Worrall, formerly something in finance and currently a Spokesman for the Meritocracy. Verity took a marker pen out of her pocket and drew balls and a phallus on Sidney Worrall’s forehead.

“That’s not very constructive,” said Vladimir.

“It’s a public expression space,” Verity replied. “Anyone can write what they like on it. I guess you don’t have those in Russia.”

Vladimir raised his palms and made an exasperated face. “You have the liberty of free speech and you abuse it doing things like that? In some countries, they don’t have that privilege.”

“His opinions stink.”

Vladimir sighed. He held out his hand. “Can I borrow your pen?”

“Not if you’re going to use it to write Sidney Worrall’s opinions.”

“I’m not. I’m going to write my own opinions.”

Verity put the marker in his hand. He snapped off the cap, and wrote “More funding for horse gengineers” on Sidney Worrall’s lapel, then continued to write something else in small letters on the man’s jacket.

“I’m not standing about while you write War and Peace. I’m going to vote. You can gimme my pen back tomorrow.” Verity went to the door, shouting over her shoulder as she left the room, “In Soviet Russia, wall writes on you.”

* * * *

Back in her quarters, Verity took up her seat at her computer and began to look through the points of law and regulations that had been nominated for referendum by the Electorate. About a month after she’d arrived on Callisto, the moon had been declared an official province and, with the base having only a few hundred inhabitants, that surely made it the smallest province in the entire Meritocracy. It also meant its electorate was entitled to nominate and cast prerogative votes on matters that only affected Callisto and its denizens. One of the first such matters to be nominated and voted in was that Referendum Day on Callisto would be the afternoon of the twenty-four-hour day on which the sun rose.

Referendum Day this time around didn’t coincide with the Meritocracy’s universal referenda, which occurred once every Martian month, so there were only these provincial prerogative votes and nominations to be dealt with. As a tier-two meritocrat, Verity was entitled to nominate two matters per referendum day, and to cast votes with a weighting of two on each of the nominations with the highest vote from the previous referendum day.

She had already decided to nominate a review of the exercise centrifuges at the facility with the intention of voting for more centrifuges to be built for the horses if that nomination was then popular enough to go to referendum the next time. She did that first, using both of her nominations on the same issue, because she saw it as being more pressing than any other issues she could come up with.

After submitting her nominations to the ANT, Verity turned her attention to the nominations from last referendum day that had been brought forward to today’s referendum. There were four of them: on frequency and allocation of radio communications access, about possibly improving the quality of the food, about regulations for importing animals as pets and, as usual, about division of the resources of the base’s only ANT between the Sky Forces and the scientific personnel. In addition to this, each of the thirty Spokesmen for the Meritocracy–people chosen directly by the Electorate each year, supposedly for their balanced opinions and clear judgment to act in case of emergency on behalf of the Electorate–had written a statement on the prerogative issues for Callisto, explaining their opinions on the nominations and links to statistics and reading material to back up the opinions. Whereas there was nothing to stop anyone from simply casting a vote without bothering to do any research, it was generally encouraged and thought responsible to read the letters from the Spokesmen and try to make one’s vote from as balanced a perspective as possible.

Verity first opened the letter from Spokesman Julia Tindall. Tindall had been a zoologist before becoming a Spokesman, and she was always the first person Verity would vote for on the universal Spokesman referendum each year. It began with a salutation to the electorate of the province of Callisto and, as Verity had expected, the first comment on her letter was about the nomination for pets. She urged caution about bringing species to Callisto whose tolerance for low gravity had not been tested, as subjecting an animal to an environment it could not healthily cope with was inhumane. Tindall recommended voters choose the option to allow species of pets not considered dangerous and known to be able to tolerate exposure to low gravity.

Verity read through the other comments and looked at some of the references. She read Sidney Worrall’s letter with disdain, then set about reading the other twenty-eight.