The Tartarus Directive

Chapter 1

Griff Markham watched the flip clock on the wall of his security station change to twelve o'clock midnight Earth Time. He switched off his ZC500 series duty communicator and exited out into the dead corridor of the ship's engineering level. He tapped out his last Kratom cigarette from its cellophane package, sticking it between his lips and tossing the empty package into a nearby recycling unit.

Griff walked toward the service elevators, pressing the call button and waiting. He listened to the low hum of the reactor core's turbines--a comforting reminder that the ship was still working and, as far as he knew, on course.

Relative silence was a luxury on the ISS Atlas II, even two light years from Earth deep in the vacuum of space. Complete silence, however, was what all the ship's unfortunate two-thousand-odd residents feared most. Complete silence meant death. Griff Markham's usual nighttime beat on the engineering level provided him with ample contemplative silence to ask the really important questions about life and consequently decide the answers to those questions were bullshit.

The opening of the elevator doors brought Griff the relief of cool, dry air, something that anyone who spent more than five minutes on the engineering level longed for more than sunlight. A faulty air conditioning system and a leaky steam condenser made the engineering level as hot and humid as a Turkish bath. This climate control problem had slowly spread throughout the ship and, though it was remedied with diligence on the residential levels, the residents still welcomed the change as those on Earth welcome the changing of the leaves in autumn or the first bloom of spring, even if neither were as miserable and as deadly as the heat waves.

Griff entered the elevator, quickly closing the doors behind him. The long wait for the lift had left the unlighted cigarette dangling limp from his mouth. He removed it and stuck it in his pocket. He pressed the button for C level: the Atium and market districts, standing in silence as he ascended from the ship's dim undercroft to the equally dim but livelier levels. Security officers were allowed access to the service elevators as they were, even with several minutes' wait, far faster than the residential elevators which sometimes took as long as twenty minutes to arrive and at peak traffic hours were packed beyond capacity with riders.

The elevator doors opened again and Griff walked out into the cavernous market. The market occupied the entire width of the ship from port to starboard, and about a third of the ship's total length on that level. High, sloping walls framed enormous, thick windows which from time to time were covered by large metal shutters. In the several years after the ship's launch, the space had served as a canteen, but now resembled a makeshift bazaar. The stainless steel and aluminum of which many of the market's fixtures had been constructed had now blackened and browned over the centuries except where laboriously maintained by vendors. Nearly half of the many dozens of booths which lined the perimeter of the market had been dismantled and stripped of their upholstery to serve as improvised bedding and make way for the vendors' stalls. The more opportunistic or perhaps merely luckier vendors had secured spots in the center of the market at the former cafeteria stations.

By this time of night, if you could even call it night, most of the vendors had closed up shop. The corporate-owned storefronts opened late and closed early but even so there were always long queues of customers. The independent vendors, like Nori Yamato with her noodle bar, were open nearly continuously as many slept beneath their shop counters. There were few residents around, most of which were unconscious drunks or the property-less sleeping in the booths until security officers came to shoo them away.

Nori Yamato stood idly at her noodle bar, mindlessly wiping the countertop with a rag and occasionally checking on the bubbling pot of broth under the counter. She was a tall, slim woman of about thirty, with a black tousled bob and the kind of face you could talk to comfortably even if she was not really listening. She always wore a variation of the same outfit: a brightly-colored t-shirt, cuffed cargo pants, and a utility vest in which she kept several cooking utensils.