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WHITE ROSE OF NIGHT
AN EAST WIND BLOWING
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THE DECEIVERS
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TWILIGHT
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DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT
TIGER, TIGER
WINDRAGE
WHITE ROSE OF NIGHT (2005 reissue)
FORTUNES OF WAR (2005 reissue)
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HELLGATE: The Rabelais Alliance
HELLGATE: Deep Sky
HELLGATE: Cry Liberty
HELLGATE: Probe
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DEATH’S HEAD (Complete & Unabridged)
EQUINOX (2003 reissue)
SCORPIO
STOPOVER
APHELION
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CALLISTO SWITCH
Mel Keegan
DreamCraft Multimedia, Australia
CALLISTO SWITCH
© 2005 by Mel Keegan
All rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between real persons or other characters, alive or dead, is strictly coincidental.
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CALLISTO SWITCH
Starship Industries Dockyards,
Callisto Launch Facility
“Sontag was on EarthLink. Did you catch the vid?”
He was right behind me in the crush around the coffee machines. Johnny Dujon, tall and big shouldered, the dark eyes filled with zeal, the red-black lion’s mane of dreadlocks tied back in the trademark pony tail. I was more than surprised to see him. What the hell was he doing in the pilots’ mess at 0300? Come to that, what was he doing on the Callisto docks at all? Civilized people were still asleep. Only drones were up and working in the wee small hours, when Kosmos City, SkyHarbor and MetroFlight were the playground of machines and hustlers.
“I caught the show.” I turned toward him and saw the light in his eyes this morning. It was the kind of zealot light that gets me anxious, excited. Not a good kind of excited, but churned up in the gut. Worried.
Jarrod Sontag was on EarthLink at least twice a week. For years I had thought the man is a pompous cretin, like half the big-shots at UNCO, and this last interview came as no surprise to me. No one in the Jupiter system could have been surprised, and most of us were simply disgusted.
So I had to wonder what could have kindled the weird glow surrounding Johnny that morning. He was always fiery, with his mix of hot French, Spanish and Caribee blood, but there was more, something I neither recognized nor understood, and it bothered me. Also, Big Johnny was on the Starship Industries docks in the early hours of a Thursday morning, when he belonged in a close-to-penthouse apartment under a SkyPark dome over on Europa, and this bothered me even more.
He was watching me like a hawk, waiting for a reaction, and I thought back to Sontag’s segment in the vidNews. For almost a half hour the anchor, Bobbie Oaks, had broadsided the man with the same Precambrian questions. The United Nations Colonial Office logo was bloated in the plasma display behind them, morphing slowly into the usual out-of-scale graphic depiction of the Alpha Centauri system, with the planet a big blue-green, disneyized beachball, and the starship – it might have been the Hubble, it’s difficult to tell because the Orion ships are all twin sisters – depicted like a cute cartoon flashlight.
They’re not cute. They’re the filthiest things in space. But the Orion ships work. And because of them there we were, Dujon and me, at the Callisto docks in the Jupiter system, both of us wishing we were almost anyplace else. And I started to sweat when I saw the gleam in his eyes.
I could still hear Oaks’s voice in my mind’s ear: So, Mr. Sontag, when will the Hope data be declassified? And then, Yes, sir, everyone is aware that transmissions from 4.4 light years out must be enhanced before low-end civilian users can digest the data. But it’s almost nine years since the Kosmos-Textron factory ship aerobraked into orbit around Hope. Folks back home want the data. Educators, technologists, politicians.
It was always the same antediluvian response from Sontag. Data was being channeled to the public every day, as soon as it was UNCO cleared. Declassified. Enhanced. Whatever. I was already groaning and reaching for the ’off’ switch when good old Bobbie O. nailed Sontag, got him good, right between his beady little politician‘s eyeballs: was Mr. Sontag not aware that UNCO’s security division went on full alert thirty-six hours before? And if he was oblivious, he was probably the only person in the solar system who was unaware of the furor.
UNCO Security Services are a private army, and always more or less on alert, but for a day and a half they had been buzzing like a nest of angry hornets. Apparently, the whole ’Net was alive with spooks, government goons. Even I knew a little about this. I log onto the ’Net when I get to work.
Six hours ago, at 21:00 on an endless, boring Wednesday night, the dockyard security system at a facility where I had worked for years needed an eyescan before it would even let me get in through the gate. I wasn’t trying to use any special gate, it was just Starship Industries’ Callisto launch facility, LockGate 9. God knows, I’ve used it a thousand times. More.