Jupiter's Halo Book Two: The Fall

Chapter Five

Maccy Chivvers stepped through the trans-terminal doors and onto the bridge deck.

Jinsin glanced up as he entered, then returned her eyes to her console without pause. Clearly, she was less than happy with the way they’d left things. Maccy smiled at her annoyance. They’d both enjoyed themselves. He knew she had. If she’d wanted something more she should have said so. He’d been upfront, open with his intentions and all being fair, they’d both been on the station long enough to know he had a reputation. She knew what she was getting.

Okay, maybe he’d been a little less than completely honest. Maybe he’d said something along the lines of putting that life behind him. It wasn’t entirely a lie. He did want to find someone special to settle down with. One day.

Would she prefer to be told today wasn’t that day or that she had just turned out not to be that special? In his experience, when a woman had ideas in her head neither was acceptable. He’d just have to live with her scorn for a while. She’d get over it sooner or later. They all did. It was just a shame they were aligned to the same work cycles for the next month; he’d have much preferred to let her simmer at a safe distance, but she’d presented the opportunity and he just had to take it.

“Maccy you bloody jont!” His eyes snapped to Holden, seated on the far side of the lower central ring. “Where ‘ave you been?”

Maccy stepped clear of the terminal and into the bridge proper, smiling wide at his friend and treating the two black-clad security men to an exuberant nod. They didn't talk much and had always refused to give even the tiniest detail about their unit or mission here. For lack of a more imaginative option, Holden and Maccy had taken to calling them 'Blacks'. They simply stared as he turned his attention back to Holden and opened his arms wide.

“You know how it is Hold, when nature calls-”

Holden shook his head.

“You piss in your suit.” He interrupted. “You left me stuck up here with the gloom twins, miss frosty and that bloody hulking menace for nearly twenty minutes!”

As he spoke he waved a hand toward the Blacks, nodded at Jinsin who refused to acknowledge his words and then jerked a thumb over his shoulder to the ominously silent statue that loomed over the bridge.

Maccy shrugged off the complaint and spun the small chair fixed into his station before hopping down onto the seat as it swung back to him. The screens of his console were dark, waiting for the DNA input to unlock their security restrictions. To the far right of the desktop was a flat pad, designed to read the DNA of the user and ensure only those with the appropriate clearance could access the console.

According to company policy, Maccy was supposed to place a thumb on there and endure the short burst of pain as the mechanism sampled his blood through the skin. It hadn’t taken long for him to see an alternative option. He tilted his head back, hawked up phlegm from the back of his throat and spat with expertise borne from hours of practice. The goblet landed directly on the pad with a wet splat.

Holden shook his head with the same wry smile he always used for this little trick. Behind him, Maccy heard Jinsin make a tutting noise to show her disgust. She’d always laughed before and told him how vile he was. She certainly hadn’t minded a little spit, delicately applied, when they’d enjoyed a bottle of rum and a rest cycle together.

One of the Blacks watched him with a sneer curling the edge of his mouth and Maccy returned another broad grin as the screens of his console came to life. They lit up with scrolling data, video feeds from across the station and a list of warning icons he quickly swiped away. He'd ignored each one as they had turned up, now he got to ignore them altogether.

“You know you’re supposed to action those.”

The tone was judging and Maccy kept his smile fixed in place as he swivelled his chair and turned into the unwelcoming glare of Jinsin.

“C’mon Jinny,” he spread his hands and let his face take on a more serious expression. “You of all people know these hands have better things they could be doing with their time.”

He winked, turned his hands up to wiggle his fingers in an impression of a move she’d seemed particularly pleased with and finished by sticking out his tongue and waggling his eyebrows.

Jinsin gave him a look of disgust, snorted and spun her back to him.

Maccy laughed.

“No? Nothing? What a short memory you’ve got.” He chuckled again and turned back to his console, catching the look of distaste from one of the Blacks.

Part of him felt a little bad for Jinny. She was a nice girl and the chase had been a lot of fun. She’d made him work for it, shunning him, teasing him, playing the role of the pure, untouchable virgin. He’d enjoyed it immensely and he would have to admit there was a moment when he genuinely thought this time might be different. That maybe more of him was engaged than just the usual single piece of anatomy.

All that had fallen away as quickly as her clothes when he finally got her though. The chase had been fun, the s*x even more so, but afterwards, he’d looked at her and known she was no different than any of the others. He’d gotten what he wanted and it had turned out to be a lot less than he’d started to think it might be.

Now she hated him and he only knew one way to act. It was the same way he'd been before; brash, loud, confident and unrestrained. Sooner or later what she thought of as disgusting had become funny and then endearing. It would be the same again after, just with a longer lead time. After all, before she'd started at indifference, now she was starting from hatred borne of her embarrassment and shame.

Maccy thought for a moment on the differences inherent in men and women. Even in this age of enlightenment, as they called it, there were still a few old fundamentals which never seemed to change. He’d had casual encounters with men, more so than with women truth be told, and that’s exactly what they’d been; casual. None of this ‘what does this mean?’ or ‘where is this going?’ rubbish. Just s*x. Just two people doing their best to pleasure each other and then carrying on with their lives. That was how it should be. Faith knows there was little else to do all the way out here.

He turned quietly, seeing both Jinsin and Holden had returned their focus to the tasks they were assigned. His eyes strayed to the hulking, dark shape stood immobile behind the Blacks. It was huge; towering over them all with a silent menace. They’d said it was harmless, unable to cause injury to humans and programmed only to wake in the event of emergency. Exactly what type of emergency hadn’t been specified.

Maccy’s stare dwelled on it for a moment. He could never shake the feeling it was looking at him, no matter what they said.

As he turned back he caught a sidelong look from Jinsin. Her lip quivered for a moment as if she were trying not to sneer and he saw the anger and disgust in her eyes.

Maccy swivelled back to his screens, thinking of an appropriate comment to rile her further when the flat panel between his hands began to flash an alarm signal. His role of monitoring the core output was generally a dull and uneventful one, but today it seemed this was not going to be the case. He pulled up the alarm code and examined the log. Someone had made an unauthorized entry into the databanks in the substation. Maccy brought the relevant video feed onto his main screen and examined the dark shape it showed. He glanced at the entry log again and then back to his screen. The log declared Comms Operator Olivier Greenhalgh had last accessed the area, but the figure he saw on the screen looked female. That was all he needed; the bloody comms team swapping badges and messing up the logs. He watched for a second as the woman on the feed moved onto another databank, her hands moving as if she were plugging something into it. He had no idea what she was doing, but he had no doubt it was going to be the cause of one hell of a headache. Maccy swiped clear the new alarm signal as it flashed up to show another databank had been accessed and sighed. It was going to be a long day.