She watched as the man called Jaxon was taken from the room. Something did not feel right, and she vowed to keep a close eye on him. The red-haired woman was also conspicuous in her absence yesterday, and their explanation felt contrived and, frankly, weak. During her preparations there was no mention of randomly selected individuals being pulled from the group on entry, which seemed like a big oversight. The intelligence had been meticulous before her insertion was forged, and her training concluded that anomalies are rarely coincidental or accidental.
She would have to keep an eye on them both. This first phase was critical to the success and it was important that she qualified every stage and made that final flight. She was not scared. There was glory in her mission, and Gaia would reward her sacrifice.
For now, she would need to put such thoughts from her head, though they inspired her. Phase one of training was a series of aptitude tests that she would need to complete in order to advance. She focused her thoughts on the mission, revelling in the opportunity.
* * *
I joined the class after lunch, where we sat through a training exercise on maintaining our equipment, using pressure-test devices, and soapy water of all things. The oxygen masks in our kit belts could be inflated without being worn, so they taught us to fill them, dunk them in the soapy water, and then check for bubbles. I could tell I wasn’t the only person who was less than gripped by the task, but they continued to drum into us the importance of our rebreathers, and our flight suits and kit belts and bags, checking and re-checking daily. The way Harris bleated on about safety you’d think they had some serious issue with the space station, but I figured he was just overplaying it so we’d remember.
A couple of hours later we were released for the day. I headed straight to the dorm to get showered up. I was contemplating an hour’s kip before dinner when Hennessey entered the dorm and announced we’d all be having short individual assessments before chow time, so I went back to the rec room and grabbed a coffee, and parked myself on one of the sofas. The tall guy sitting opposite had already introduced himself as Mark Hanson. He was an engineer from Bedfordshire, and had previously worked in the Coalition Air Force as a flight mechanic. By all appearances he was quite the alpha, but turned out to be very softly spoken and, it seemed, relatively shy. We talked for a little while, and then Hennessey appeared and asked Hanson to follow her.
I turned my attention to the room as he walked away. Most of the crew were out here, with the exception of one of the women. I assumed she was in the dorm, but I didn’t like the fact that she was the only one not present. The rest of the group were chatting between themselves. Leon had regained some of his swagger after the verbal beating he got this morning, but it looked to me like everyone was keeping him at arm’s-length.
One by one, we were all taken into one of the training rooms for ten minutes. I sat and watched each of them come and go, and they all returned unwilling to talk about what the assessment was. I assumed they’d been told to keep it to themselves until everyone had been through the process. The missing woman turned up about halfway through, hair still wet from the shower so I gave her the benefit of the doubt, although she must look like a prune if she’d been in the shower for the last half an hour. I shook that thought from my head and looked up to see Hennessey approaching. She motioned for me to follow.
She took me into a smaller training room. It was more of a large office I suppose. She asked me to sit at the desk.
“It was a good idea, Jaxon, but unfortunately we struck out.”
“Nobody saw him?” I couldn’t believe it.
“Quite the opposite; everybody saw him.”
“Crap. I thought you’d eliminate most, but not all. It was always a likelihood though. He was hardly inconspicuous. So what’s the next step?”
“Well, we’re working under the assumption that it’s not you or Mr Prouse—he’s far too up his own arse to be covert in any circumstances.”
“I agree. I would doubt it’s Hanson either. We only had a brief chat, but he seems quite genuine. Used to be a flight engineer in the CAF, and doesn’t strike me as someone that takes the difficult path if there’s an easier one open to him.”
“That was my assessment too, but we can’t quite discount him yet. On balance, he’s an unlikely candidate, but then how often do you hear about a terrible crime being committed, and the neighbours are all shocked and saying ‘he seemed such a nice quiet man, always helped me with my bins…’” She put on an old lady voice for that part, and I must have smiled because she looked at me and laughed.
I couldn’t see Hanson being a real suspect, but she did have a point. I’d taken a number of people at face value in my life and ended up paying for it later.
“It’s much more likely to be one of the women. There are only six, and one of them is Laura, so five potential candidates. It’s obviously easier for Laura to keep an ear out in the shower block, without drawing attention to herself, so you’ll just have to get to know them all and see how that plays out.”
I nodded. It made sense. It wouldn’t sit well for me to hang around while the ladies were showering—that’s more Leon’s game, and I suspected he’d alienate himself from the group relatively quickly, which would only leave myself and Mark as approachable members of the opposite sex. Given Mark’s apparent shyness, I was wondering how I’d figure into this equation. The thought terrified me.
We chatted for a couple of minutes more to drag it out to a plausible length and then wrapped things up, and I headed back to the dorm.
* * *
The next few days were more of the same. Harris and Hennessey were having briefings every morning with Grealish and Cooper, but I got the sense that little progress had been made. Both made excuses to talk to me each day, but we had to be careful so as not to look like we were collaborating on something. For my part, I’d gleaned nothing of any real significance, although I was still wary of one of the women, Amanda, who seemed much more on the periphery than the others. I didn’t voice this concern to Harris or Hennessey just yet, because I didn’t want them to focus on one person and miss something, but there was a definite feeling in my gut about the other blonde.
Laura moved into Hennessey’s chosen bed, so we were only a few feet apart. We’d chat about everything and nothing before lights out, but were careful to keep the conversation light. She seemed pretty switched on—maybe a little intense, but without doubt very focused. What private moments we did have together she’d tell me about university and her grandparents—never straying towards her recruitment into the ICP. I sensed some internal struggle. She told me how quickly she’d gone from being an outside operative to inside Compression. She lacked family, but I could hear her throat catch when she talked about her friends and neighbours. I felt for her, and for the first time I felt a little out of sorts because I’d spent most of my life alone, keeping everyone at arm’s-length.
As suspected, it didn’t take long for people to stop worrying about the communal bathroom facilities, although Leon made a habit of timing his showers to coincide with whichever of the women had taken his fancy that day. Not until day four did we get a shouting match between one of the women and Leon. I say ‘match’, but really she was just bawling him out for walking into her shower cubicle. He protested his innocence, but nobody believed him—he’d shown his true colours from day one, and I wondered how long before he was inevitably extricated from the program.
When the shouting started everyone ran to the bathroom only to find Leon, face down, naked as the day he was born, with his arm twisted up behind his back by an equally naked woman called Amanda—the other blonde. She seemed completely unabashed, and it was only when Laura stepped in to separate them that she grabbed a towel and covered herself up. There were cold lines of fury across her face and her whole body was coiled, ready to lay into him again. She could look after herself, clearly, and I found myself wondering where she’d learned to put those moves on anyone. I definitely needed to keep an eye on her.
An hour later, once everything had calmed down, we were all on the sofas with coffee and toast, except Leon who was sulking in the dorm. Harris walked in and beckoned us to join him in a room in the far corner we hadn’t been in before. I went to fetch Leon, and then headed to the room. As we entered there were some audible groans—it was a fully fitted out gym, with some serious tech in the gear in front of us. Cue the pep talk.
“You are all going to be living in space. It is paramount that you are in peak physical condition for your journey to the Bertram Ramsay. Whilst astronauts no longer suffer the rigours of G-force in space flight, thanks to modern technology, it is imperative that you begin conditioning your bodies for the increased gravity on the Bertram Ramsay. The entire facility rotates at one hundred and four per cent of the required speed to produce Earth’s gravity, and so your bones will feel heavier, and you will fatigue more quickly. Four per cent may not sound much, but if you do not condition your muscles to handle it, it will have a significant impact on your ability to function aboard. So, starting from today, you will be doing daily workouts in here, with structured exercises designed to increase your muscle tone and fitness.”
Harris asked us to take our hollopads from our kit bags and load them up into the docks on the far wall. Each of us had an assessment program to get through, each identical, to determine the course of our conditioning over the next three months. We were each given gym clothing, training shoes and bio-monitors that linked with our hollopads via our bracelets. We had a ninety-minute program to complete, across various different machines, including a ten-metre-long hydrotherapy pool with underwater treadmill.
I admit I was pretty confident in lasting out the ninety minutes, having spent half my life running up and down stairs and walking to and from the commune, and I got to work without complaint only to end up flat on my back, barely able to breathe after just eighteen minutes. I wasn’t the only one either, or the first to drop. But I wasn’t the last, and to my great annoyance Leon managed almost fifty minutes before he found himself in a heap on the floor, gasping for oxygen to fill his lungs.
We were each handed a carton of fluids to rejuvenate, some special cocktail of minerals and modified water, whilst Harris collected up the hollopads and redistributed them to each of us.
“While you all recover, allow me to give you the good news. Firstly, nobody ever completes that workout in their first eight weeks. It is designed specifically to break both your will and your body, which it clearly has. And now the bad news—each and every one of you will be expected to complete that workout by the time we finish Compression. This is not a negotiation.
“You will shortly receive an assessment of today’s performance and a program to build your muscle mass and fitness. Once a week, you will do the entire program and will be assessed as you were today. There are eleven assessments remaining, so you will need to stick to your program. These are not supervised activities. You will be expected to come to the gym daily, at your own leisure, to complete your daily program.”
We were dismissed and given two hours of recovery time before our next session. Looking at the faces of the crew, I could see more than a few were considering bed as a credible option right now. Personally, I was weighing up between sleep, and hunting down the person that devised this program, and dismembering them, but dismissed the latter in light of my current inability to move my limbs.
Emotions were still high, and the feeling that we’d abandoned our homes and anyone we ever knew or loved weighed heavily throughout, so the intensity of the last few hours had wrung out what little resolve any of us had maintained. I headed for the showers, exhausted and spent. My gym clothes were soaked through with sweat, so I lobbed them into the laundry chute and soaked for ten minutes under the steamy jets in the shower room. My muscles were still screaming at me for the punishment I’d just given them, and that was only twenty minutes. I seriously wondered how I’d ever get to the ninety-minute mark.
I grabbed myself a change of clothes, pulled some shorts on and wandered back into the dorm.