Contamination: Space Agent Jonathan Bartell, #1
By Patty Jansen
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About this ebook
Jonathan Bartell is a young man, just out of university, when he signs up for the position of Quarantine Officer at the Orbital Launch Station.
He is part of a crop of students who flocked to study exo-biology when bacteria were discovered on Mars, and who are now all making their living flipping burgers, because the jobs are few and hard to get.
He is lucky to get a job in space, no matter how mundane.
Or so he thinks...
Gaby Larsen is a doctor at the tiny hospital at the space station, and she keeps secrets, not because she wants to keep them, but because she is too scared to share them.
Because out in space, your worst enemies are your fellow travellers.
Patty Jansen
Patty lives in Sydney, Australia, and writes both Science Fiction and Fantasy. She has published over 15 novels and has sold short stories to genre magazines such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact.Patty was trained as a agricultural scientist, and if you look behind her stories, you will find bits of science sprinkled throughout.Want to keep up-to-date with Patty's fiction? Join the mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/qqlAbPatty is on Twitter (@pattyjansen), Facebook, LinkedIn, goodreads, LibraryThing, google+ and blogs at: http://pattyjansen.com/
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Contamination - Patty Jansen
Chapter 1
JONATHAN INSPECTED the buttons of his brand new uniform—check—the Velcro straps on his shoes—check—his shirt being tucked in—check—and his name badge on the pocket of his shirt—check. He knocked on the door with the sign that said, D. White
and underneath that, Orbital Launch Station Quarantine Officer
.
Somewhere inside the room, a female voice said, Come in.
Jonathan pressed his hand against the metal panel on the door. The tiny light next to the panel flashed green and the door rumbled aside. He stepped into the tiny office and felt like he was pushed sideways. He almost tripped and most unceremoniously landed into the chair opposite Danna White’s desk.
She looked at him over the rim of her reading glasses. Her hair was cropped short, with the pepper-and-salt curls cropped close to her head.
I didn’t say you could sit down.
Her severe face was lit from below by her computer screen. Her expression held not a shred of humour.
Um. Sorry.
He scrambled up, trying to keep his balance, but a little voice in his head kept telling him that he was on an invisible bus rumbling down an invisible street and that, at any time, this bus might swerve, or stop.
That said, he’d been feeling a lot better than on the shuttle—that had been plainly awful—but still, artificial gravity didn’t have a blip on the real thing, and trying to walk inside a bike tube that was spinning at 3.5 rotations a minute was an acquired skill.
A skill that all those people in the Orbital Launch Station’s corridors had acquired, but he had, evidently, not.
And that made him the butt of jokes.
He clutched his pad harder, determined not to stumble or—worse—run off in search of a place to barf. That would never do, facing a woman who was his new boss and old enough to be his mother.
Sit down, Mr Bartell.
Jonathan sat down again in the same chair, looking at her wrinkled hands. In space, fluids tended to accumulate in the body’s extremities and she should look less old than on Earth.
On second thoughts, maybe she was old enough to be his grandmother.
Did you sleep well and are you rested enough to start your job?
Yes.
And because yes alone was such a lonely word, he added, Ma’am.
And then, because she was not military, he thought that was probably the wrong thing to say—
She laughed. You’re very green, right?
Arrived yesterday.
So I’ve heard.
With the ghost of a smile on her face.
Jonathan cringed. Who had been spreading the story about him having his face buried in a barf bag for almost the entire journey? You know what happens when you barf in zero-g?
She turned to her computer and flicked through a couple of screens. You’re a biologist by training?
Exobiologist.
He tried to sit in whatever felt the best definition of straight
to him.
She rose and started rummaging in drawers set in the back wall of the tiny office.
A memory crossed his mind: it had been yesterday—or whatever passed for yesterday UTC—before boarding the shuttle. He sat in the shuttle departure hall amongst the passengers waiting to be let aboard the shuttle. Half of the passengers were military people of the shoulder-clapping, we’ll-get-the-fucking-bastards type. Friendly enough, in a threatening look-at-my-muscles sort of way.
He hadn’t really wanted to talk to any of them, but this buff dude in full uniform with a few decorations and polished buttons had asked him if he was going up to the station, which Jonathan said he was, and then he’d asked what Jonathan’s field of work was.
Upon hearing of Jonathan’s degree, Mr Shiny-buttons said, So, we discover a few microbes on some godforsaken planet, and four years later, we got space-fucking-biologists coming out our ears. I hear some have to work in fast food joints. Space biology, huh?
Pretty much a decent assessment of the truth and also a real damper on the prospect of intelligent in-flight discussion.
The five-hour flight was about to get boring.
A bit later, one of the other military guys sat next to him on the flight while waiting for take-off.
He asked, I just heard you talking to Cresswell back there on the surface. Space biologist, huh? What are you going to do up at the Station?
Um. Work for the Quarantine Authority.
Everyone had looked at him as if he were something stuck to the bottom of their shoe and had treated him like that for the rest of the flight.
Quarantine Authority was obviously the wrong answer. By the looks on their faces, it was possibly even worse than exobiology. Obviously the point of the Quarantine Authority was to stand in the military’s way, and make their jobs harder with annoying forms and regulations.
Pardon the sarcasm.
Jonathan jolted when Danna White held a data pad under his nose, a thin model. Flexible screen. This will be yours. It contains all the netware you need to perform your job as Quarantine Officer. Read all of it through carefully. Come to me if you have any questions.
He took the pad. Is there going to be any on-the-job training?
This is the training. The job is simple. You check the forms that each ship will have completed and sent ahead. If they haven’t sent it, you get the Captain or a representative to fill it out. The pad contains the checklists of things you need to look at. Make sure all the fields are filled in for each of the crewmembers and that the captain of each ship signs off on it. I’d walk you through, but it’s insanely busy and we’ve got a lot of unhappy captains out there, because of the new regulations that came out of the Mars case. You do know about that, right?
Jonathan nodded.
The settlement of Newton had been a case study in his last year of his degree. It consisted of a couple of dome-based or underground habitats interlinked by tunnels for vehicular transport. Population: four thousand.
Those who predicted Mars would harbour bacterial life had been