Chapter 01 - Oscar

Starlight reflected off waxy leaves, like thousands of tiny, blinking eyes scattered across the greenhouse. Oscar plucked a fingerful of scarlet stigma from the delicate purple bloom of a saffron plant and considered popping them into his mouth then and there, consequences be damned. Across the raised bed, his prison-mate Idie gave him a sharp look, prompting Oscar to drop his bounty into the container on the steel table between their gardening boxes. Oscar and Idie – and the other eight prisoners in this particular greenhouse – performed the same task. They collected red threads from flower buds, discarded any unsuitable pieces, placed the herbs in bins for later drying, and shuffled down the line in pairs, with a plastic tub of their collections sliding along between them. Like many of the plants they tended to, these were intended for human consumption, and would eventually cover the planet Venus in edible vegetation.

As on Earth, saffron would see use first as ingredients in the food prepared for the ship’s crew. The real crew, anyway, Oscar thought as he reached into another blossom. The Adonis IV, like its predecessors, was a ship with two populations: the half-military, half-corporate crew which manned the ship, and the labor force - comprised of prisoners like Idie and himself. Vajra might have intended to create their own planetary saffron monopoly, but damned if they would share a perfectly good spice with criminals.

Also like its predecessors, the Adonis IV was an orbital-built, Jagganath-class vessel, provided by the Vajra Energy Corporation to the United States military in a bid to terraform a new world before the first one died. The deal would have put the U.S. back on the economic map by leading the space race once again, except public backing for space exploration had dwindled nearly as much as political backing. As such, the Adonis mission was a complete secret, funded privately by Vajra in exchange for mining and agricultural rights on Venus. Oscar would have called it genius had he not been thrown under the wheels and had his life’s work stolen from him. He nearly spat just thinking about it.

If not for his lab’s creation of nanomechanical flora – politely dubbed “stem grass” by Oscar during its first demonstration - the scientific miracle of terraforming missions like this wouldn’t be possible. It was a well-salted wound that Vajra allowed the scientists they stole from to work near their own project each day. Though he and Idie were plucking saffron, they were surrounded on all sides by the tall, flat-blades of science-perfected plants. Every greenhouse on the Adonis IV held a collection of stem grass. All twelve sections of the greenhouse ring, each with a hundred greenhouse cabins each, rotated lazily with the rest of the ship to obtain optimum sunlight and simulate gravity. Surrounding the rows and rows of raised beds where prisoners mindlessly picked crops and spices, tiered steps of planters full of stem grass rose in every direction. It created a view of softly rolling green hills, if Oscar squinted his eyes and pretended that hills naturally looked like Mayan pyramids.

Each greenhouse was like this, with a different “companion plant” at its center. Stem grass was a miracle creation in agriculture – nanomachines designed to act like plant cells, yet able to take in stimuli and adapt to any environment almost immediately. The trick was cultivating it so that it “learned” to not kill any other plant it grew near in its rapid-adaptation process. Thus, many otherwise expensive plants were brought along on the terraforming mission, bought and managed by Vajra.

Though saffron would be a plant specifically cultivated on Venus to create a regulated surplus of the rare herb, hoping for any to be used in the prisoners’ basic meals was beyond wishful thinking. Oscar thought about the taste on his tongue and he couldn’t help salivating; saffron was far too intense to actually enjoy eating a mouthful of, but he had to admit the temptation was always there after a few bowls of prison gruel. Oscar was shaken out of his train of thought when he realized he was being spoken to.

"Any luck today?" Idie repeated, her eyes staying trained on the work in front of her.

"Yes and no," Oscar said, pulling his mind back to the moment. He peeled off another pinch of threads before continuing. "The tablet we borrowed from Captain Niman didn’t have anything incriminating on it, but it did have a lead."

A look of amusement crept across Idie’s lips. "Still using choice words like ’borrowed,’ Oscar? I’ve never seen someone so in denial of being a criminal."

Oscar stopped in the middle of the next plant and waited until Idie met his eyes. When she realized he’d stopped, she looked to him and over to the guard, back to her plant, back to Oscar. "Oh my god, are you kidding?" she hissed. "It’s hard enough to have these conversations quietly without you acting ridiculous."

"We are not criminals, Idie," Oscar said.

"You need to make better decisions about getting dressed in the morning, then," she said, nodding to his prisoner fatigues. The brown and grey garments were lined with florescent material, outlining their limbs and their names, each stitched on the front and back of the uniforms. Not exactly casual attire. Oscar preferred to think of his as a surrogate lab coat rather than a mark of his imprisonment. As far as he was concerned, working in the greenhouse on good behavior was just a job he’d taken on the side while he got his legal matters with the Vajra Corporation settled.

Oscar stood firm. "We only did what we had to.”

"You know who says that?” she asked. “Criminals. People who went too far. Oh for God’s sake, Oz, don’t threaten the damn flower - Alright, alright," she huffed as Oscar took his twisting grip off his hostage Saffron plant. "We’re not criminals. Get back to work, already, you’re going to get beaten again." She eyed him for a moment longer as he resumed saffron-picking. A few beats passed while they made sure the guard hadn’t decided to shush them. "So what’s the lead?"

Oscar took a series of slow, spaced breaths - a habit he used to get back on a train of thought. He released his lungs while thinking out the word "inoculation." He liked to pick out words to time his exhalation to, especially if it had to do with a problem he was working on. "There was mention of a team working in Greenhouse Cabin 1-87," he said. "The log said they were a genetics crew, working on hybridizing. The datapad also indicated that there is a larger host of guards than usual for those greenhouses."

Idie frowned, but nodded, chewing on the information. "You think they’re using our research?"

"They must," Oscar said. "I also found confirmation that greenhouses 80 through 100 on every section only houses one kind of plant."

This time, Idie stopped, though she quickly noticed her pause and grabbed another flower. "Stem grass?"

"If they’re working on hybridizing it for specific applications, then they’ll need our original studies to work from." Oscar nodded at his own words, the plainness of the facts becoming more and more obvious to him as he shared them with Idie. "If we can get our hands on one of the geneticists’ datapads, we can find our own work in plain use and finally have something against Vajra."

Idie pursed her lips in a revealing smile. "You’ve always had a funny way of making a lost cause seem like the fight’s just begun. I’m guessing you have a plan?”

He hummed thoughtfully. “As a matter of fact… Nope,” he said. “I was hoping you’d have some ideas.”

Idie’s smile dropped into a look of exasperation. “Right.” This exchange wasn’t uncommon. Even during their days working from the makeshift lab in Oscar’s garage, he had always left the high-level planning to Idie. Though she feigned frustration, she excelled at this sort of abstract puzzle-solving, something Oscar had always admired in her. Of course, back then their team had included three others to bounce ideas off of. Wells and Trista had been murdered, and Benjamin had been thrown in prison along with Oscar and Idie. He hadn’t spoken to them after that. Somewhere on another of the prison ring’s twelve sections, Ben was on his own, and Oscar could only guess that’s how his old friend wanted it.

“Well, we’ll need to get into two places to be sure,” Idie said. She set their full bin on the open table behind her after gaining a guard’s attention and acknowledgement. She brought an empty bin over from the same table as another prisoner approached and took their load away. “One of us needs to get into the greenhouses in Section One, to get a sample of the stem grass and find out what lab they’re researching in. And one of us needs to get into the lab cabin once we’ve located it and get a hold of a datapad.”

“I only have one more favor with Mayhew to pull for the greenhouse shift,” Oscar said, crestfallen. “Favor” was interchangeable with “Transfer” when it came to the greenhouses, and without two, they’d either have to work on earning another one, or adjust the plan to use only one person. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t let him or Idie work around the stem grass – far from it. Vajra was so arrogantly sure they had won their legal battle that they were content to let the actual creators work around their stolen project. That was where they’d slipped up, as Oscar meant to capitalize on their underestimation. Despite this, changing greenhouses was paperwork the guards just didn’t care to bother with, and so going from one set of plants to another was a tough argument to make to any crew who didn’t owe you one.

“I’ll check around, see who needs something,” he added. Whether it was running a message or trading for some of the illegal herbs that were being grown in various nooks in various greenhouses, there was always a crewman that wanted something to take away from the monotony of space travel. “I’ll bet you that Whitman would be willing to--“

He cut off. Idie had thrown a flower petal into the bin with her pinch of red stigma. It was a small, meaningless gesture to any onlookers, but between them it was a signal of someone in earshot. Oscar carefully peered over his shoulder and saw a young woman plugging a pressure gauge into one of the humming atmosphere columns just a few feet away. He continued working, but wondered at how someone so young was on the ship. She had to have been eighteen, but barely looked the year. Yet she wore the uniform of an engineer, pale yellow with grey detailing that complemented the deep olive-brown of her skin, and her black ponytail was fed through the strap in her hard-cap. All in all, she looked familiar to Oscar in a haunting way he couldn’t quite place.

Oscar raised an eyebrow at Idie to silently reserve a conversation about changes in military age restriction, but she kept her gaze down. He’d have to ask around when he had more time to--

“Excuse me,” said the girl. Oscar heard, but didn’t turn. He figured she had been speaking to the guard at the door. When she repeated the words and tapped his shoulder, Oscar half-jumped in surprise. He spun around to look with such speed that the nearest guard audibly tightened his grip on his baton. He was guaranteed to be watching the conversation.

Oscar composed himself, but must have still looked confused, because the girl raised an eyebrow when he half-spoke the words “Need help with homework?”

“Interesting,” the girl said. “It’s almost as though you think I can be insulted by someone in shackles.” When Oscar looked up from the bindings around his ankles, she held up her pressure gauge. “As a matter of fact, I wanted to ask you two about the composition of the atmosphere in this cabin.”

Her unabashed response threw Oscar off, but Idie chimed in with caution. “What would you like to know?”

“How long have you been working in here?”

“Since March, Western-standard calendar. About three weeks, I think.”

The girl nodded. “Have you noticed any changes in the atmosphere during the last few days? A difference in feelings of overall pressure, or perhaps a different scent to the air?”

Oscar frowned. “It’s a bit difficult to smell much besides saffron in here.” He sniffed to punctuate the statement, fuzzy ticklings of spicy hay and greenery filling his head. “That said, I’ve felt like the pressure in here is perhaps… less?”

“I agree,” Idie said. “It’s as though the humidity has dropped just slightly.”

“I see,” the girl said, her gaze melting from the prisoners in front of her to ponder the thought. She looked back up when another question struck her. “And the plants? They seem to be faring well, but has production lessened?”

It was an odd question for an engineer, even one interested in the greenhouses. Oscar couldn’t quite place why the whole situation felt wrong, but before he could continue the line of thinking, he noticed the girl’s name patch.

“…Harmon?” He asked. “Do I… Know you?”

The girl paled slightly, and without any further words, she bowed and walked away at a brisk stride. Oscar took a step after her, but stopped short when the guard drew his baton. The Harmon girl turned the first available corner and soon disappeared behind the cubic hills of stem grass.

Oscar turned back to Idie, who looked as surprised as he did. “Did Ben have a kid?” he asked. Idie just shrugged, her mouth half open with words she couldn’t quite say.

He finally shook the idea from his mind. “Wouldn’t that be ridiculous?” he laughed. “We worked with Ben for the better part of a decade, and here I’m thinking I’ve somehow not heard about him having children. Bruce must have hit me in the head too.” Oscar flexed his right foot, straining past the stiff pain. One of the major groups of thugs in Prison 5-37 was led by a behemoth of a man known as Bruce Marelit. Apparently he was a chef of some sort until he murdered his own business partner after he found out the guy had been stealing from him. Now that Bruce was in 5-37, he saw others as a resource to use and didn’t like hearing ‘no’ any more than Oscar liked having his foot stomped until misshapen.

Idie offered a look of concern, but Oscar just smiled wanly. “Well,” he said, “We need to confirm which greenhouse is closest to the guard outpost in Section One so the ‘distraction’ can transfer there, and we need an extra favor to get the other of us over by the lab.”

“Are you suggesting a Fall-Guy Routine?” she asked, unenthused about the idea.

He winked. “No need to have two of us injured.”

Before Idie could protest further, Oscar stuffed his hand into the bin of saffron and stuffed a small handful into his mouth. His cheeks immediately seized at the long-forgotten punch in the mouth called flavor.

“Hey!” the nearest guard yelled. “Spit it out! Now!”

Oscar raised his hands casually, working the saffron to the side of his mouth. “Sphit what out, exphactly?” He clenched his teeth, the bitter, sea-water and honey flavor instantly overwhelming his tastebuds. I really, really hope Mayhew will trade in saffron, he thought.

The guard whipped out his baton and yelled again. “Spit out the saffron, asshole!”

“Ohhhh, the phaffron?” As the guard brought his baton up, Oscar spat a portion of the red stems on the man’s boots. He wouldn’t have dared spit on his face, satisfying thought it might have been; Oscar didn’t have the time to spare for the isolation cells.

Sticky red strings on his boots seemed to be enough for the guard, though. He flogged Oscar across the shoulder, sending him reeling to the side. Pain shot up Oscar’s neck, making him clench his jaw. Instead of lying prone, he rolled up onto his knees and wrapped his arms around the enraged guard. “Hey, man! I think we had a misunderstanding! Come here, let’s hug it out.” Oscar hung on for as long as he could stand as the guard bashed the top of his head with the butt of his baton. When he finally let go, he fell backward, not sure what direction was up anymore.

The guard stepped over Oscar and raised his baton. “Last chance, punk! Spit it out and stand down!”

Knowing that Idie had taken the moment to cheek a more discreet amount of saffron, Oscar held up a hand to the enraged guard and slowly spit the saffron onto the floor beside himself. “Okay man, okay,” he said. “Sorry. I’m sorry. The food they give us, you know it’s awful - it’s hard to not want to chew on anything else for a while just to break it up.”

The guard eyed him sternly, baton still held high.

“Seriously, I tried to eat some of the soap in the showers the other day.”

This made the guard restrain a chuckle, and the man stepped back. “Alright, go wash your mouth out. Do it again, and you’re going straight to Iso.”

“Got it, boss,” Oscar said, holding out a hand. “Help me up?”

“Eat shit,” replied the guard.

“Might be better than the gruel.” Oscar nodded, and pulled himself to his feet with some effort. The guard only watched him, which he supposed was fair enough. He couldn’t think of any of the prisoners - save for Idie - that he’d risk getting attacked by for offering a helping hand, so feeling insulted by the guard not offering was a waste of energy.

After rinsing blood and saffron out of his mouth at a nearby cleaning station, Oscar limped back over to the work table, where Idie watched him with her special blend of scorn and care.

“How you doing?” he smiled, relieving some of her stress.

She arched an eyebrow. “Pretty good, and you?”

“Ah, I’ve been worse,” he said, rubbing his head so that his sleeve revealed the end of a data drive he’d pulled off the guard during their ‘hug.’ He grinned. “I’ve definitely been worse.”