The Hundred Worlds

by J. F. Holmes

  I bumped the button to close the airlock with my elbow, and paused to give the hatch an experimental tug, before sliding down the half-ladder into the ship’s central corridor. “Kids, I’m home,” I announced, letting the good cheer creep into my voice.

  My tone must have been obvious, because a pair of heads popped out of the mess hatch to see what the fuss was about.

  Cole and Calliope each had hair the color of copper wire, but the resemblance ended there. He was lanky, where his sister was curvy. His steps into the corridor were awkward and jerky – the remnants of one-to-many beatings as a kid. Cole and I had been fast enough to keep away from the pirates and main-floor scum on Tocchet, but in the pecking order of those who lived off pirate crumbs, we’d been a lot smaller and not nearly as mean as the rest of the lost children the pirates discarded after each raid. Malnutrition had left both Cole and me shorter than we might have been otherwise, but his poorly-set broken bones had left him with a hitching gait.

  Our life as ‘lost boys’ had been bad, but not nearly as bad as what Cal had endured. Boys were discarded, left to fend for themselves in the depths of the station. For the pirates, it was an ideal situation. They didn’t have to invest much in the way of resources to keep the kids going, and the ones that made it to their teen years were scrappy, ideal recruits to replace aging scalawags.

  Girls, though. Girls were a valuable resource.

  Cal didn’t talk much about life in the brothel. I knew, ever since the day the Marines stormed the station and stomped the pirates flat, she’s never been without a knife, and the slightest touch is enough to set her off. That was problematic when we were running in other crews. Ever since we scraped together the funds for our own ship, she’s remained aboard, even going so far as to decline opportunities for R&R.

  They’re my only friends, and the closest thing to a family I have left.

  I held the duffel out. My friends stared into its depths, suitably awed.

  “That,” Cole said, “is a fat wad of cash.”

  “We’re going to have to spend a lot of it,” I replied. “But yeah, the second installment should be a nice chunk of profit. Get us a slot on the next transport to Earth.”

  The Puller might have been twice the size of a pre-space jumbo jet, but that still wasn’t big enough to mount a space fold drive. For long distances, we were at the whim of transit schedules, which were often delayed until the big, hollow jump-haulers had enough cargo stowed to make a wormhole transition worth it. But as the saying went, all roads lead to Earth. I didn’t think we’d have to wait long.

  ***

  The train jerked into motion, then settled into a smoother rhythm as it built up speed. This was flyover country; the powers that be hadn’t deigned to upgrade the mass transit lines to the smoother and faster mag-lev systems. I took a glance around the cabin out of habit more than anything else. I could see no threats in the exhausted and careworn faces of my fellow passengers.

  That didn’t ease the itch where I typically carried my sidearm much. My military record and life since discharge were enough to certify my bond from the government as a certified bounty hunter, but the closer you got to the core systems, the harder it was to get the same blessing to carry, even concealed. Here on Earth, firearms were the exclusive purview of Citizen Uncle, and he didn’t like to share.

  Earth-normal G is rough on Cole, so there was never any question about him coming along, but I’d had to fight with Cal to get her to stay behind. Despite her good looks, she’s one of the best – and deadliest – hands with a knife I’ve ever seen, and she’s always got at least one on her person at all times.

  “This is going to be a milk run,” I’d said, while trying to ignore the fact that I was setting myself up for a visit from good ol’ Murphy. “In and out. You guys need to stick together, just in case.”

  She’d never been much for debate, but the look she gave me was enough. Cal was pissed, but that was all right. We’d all been through too much to let a little disagreement like that cause a rift.

  In a way, I was more worried about the ship than I was myself. And if the twins stayed behind, I knew the Puller would be just fine. Without her, we’d be stuck here on Earth, and that was a fate worse than death, scenery aside.

  Outside the window, the continuous green blur of farm fields whizzed by. Hybrid seeds and advanced industrial farming methods resulted in yields that could feed a multitude of worlds. A good share of the breadbasket of the UN’s entire demesne sat along the railway, stretching across the Midwest and the Great Plains and lapping at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.

  Massive, computer-piloted combine harvesters ran over and across the rows, processing corn into their hoppers. I didn’t know where it would go after that, but I didn’t see the green of growing things as I watched the massive machines go about their work.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t remember the name of the place. It was a backwater, a place of no consequence. But when the farmers on that planet decided they were sick and tired of the long hand of the UN, they dropped their plows and revolted. The local police joined in on the revolt, and the UNCS planetary reps didn’t have the manpower to stand against a coordinated group like that. When the first ANFO bomb went off in the capital, the powers that be had taken all they were going to take. They sent in the Marines.

  In a way, a planetary bombardment would have been cleaner. I know there are plenty who hail the restrictions the armistice laid out as some great step forward, but I’ve never heard it from anyone who’s participated in, or been on the receiving end of, a combat drop.

  The rebels didn’t stand a chance against a full battalion of hardened pirate-killers. It was a massacre. Satellite recon pinpointed the rebel strongholds. We surrounded them, softened them up with artillery, then assaulted. We had automatic weapons, smart mortars, armored vehicles, drone support…

  They had what contents they’d managed to purloin from various police armories, pickup trucks with heavy weapons bolted into the beds, and more than a few combine harvesters like the ones outside the window. They slapped steel plate on them, but they still weren’t anywhere close to armored, not really. They were just big targets.

  I pulled the pin on my enlistment not long after. I signed up to kill pirates, not farmers.

  Don’t get me wrong, the idiots had it coming. The biggest kid on the block may be an asshole, but you don’t pick a fight with him and all his buddies when you’re half his size. I don’t love everything the government does, but armed resistance is a fool’s way forward.

  I sighed and glanced at the countdown clock mounted at the front of the train car. We were half an hour from my stop. I tucked my chin into my chest and tried not to think about green fields running red, or the stench of burning corn silk.

  ***

  I’d dealt with my contact a few times before, but never in person. She was understandably cagey. The suburbs from the Chicago metroplex overlapped the community surrounding the university, and the shopping mall at the intersection point was truly something to behold, ten stories of unbridled commercial avarice. Just being there put me in a bad mood. NuBai was bad enough, but it was understandable; a place where the ’crats and oligarchs could drop the masks they used to present themselves as human. The people here were just ordinary citizens looking for a bargain. I scanned passing faces and wondered if they ever put any thought into how much better they had it than the outer systems.

  With a snort of derision, I pushed the thought away and crossed my arms over my chest. Earth’s making you cynical, Marine.

  The chair at my right chirped across the floor as my contact pulled it out and took a seat. I took a sip of awful food court coffee and raised an eyebrow.

  Dahlia Patil was shorter than I expected, which was understandable, given we’d only ever interacted over a comm screen. The hair at the side of her head was close-cropped for easy access to her plants, and she’d drawn the longer red-and-blue streaked hair of her scalp into a topknot that br
ushed the shoulders of her faded jean jacket.

  She occupied her daytime hours developing mobile software apps. On the side, she freelanced as a white-hat hacker. I didn’t carry a comm, so the latest software port of Candy Crush was of no use to me.

  “Long time no see, Reedsy,” she said with a grin.

  “Back at ya,” I agreed. “I thought you’d be taller.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I bring you a gold mine, and I get short jokes?” She made as if to leave, then laughed at the pained expression on my face. “God, you’re so easy.”

  I sighed. “What have you got for me?”

  She pulled a tablet out of her purse and flipped through it with her finger. “Your girl and her friend took some pains to fly under the radar, literally. The cops were stymied, even with Citizen Underwood prodding them–”

  “Wait,” I said. “Citizen Underwood? He’s an Uncle?”

  “Fairly high up, too.” She nodded. “Case like this wouldn’t normally merit much attention. She didn’t seem under duress, they traveled under legit names. The fact it went as far as it did was all on him.”

  I grimaced. The fact that Sara had connections like that wasn’t an issue, per se. It had been more than obvious that Underwood was big time, but I’d figured him more for a businessman than as a government rep. If anything, it raised the stakes of the assignment. Failure to deliver might jeopardize my status as a bonded recovery agent, or worse.

  I rubbed my temples with my forefingers. “Shit. That’s just great. Is there any good news?”

  “Well, I can tell you where they went.” I didn’t respond but waved a hand for her to continue. “They flew out of Indy on a one-way transit pass to NuBai.”

  I growled in frustration. “I just came from the NuBai gate. I wish I’d known she’d headed that way before I wasted the transit fees.”

  Dahlia held up a black-painted fingernail to slow my rant. “Ah, but a little more digging, and what do I see? Another pair of one-way tickets headed out-system from NuBai to Leominster.” She flipped her tablet over and showed me a blurry picture. The quality wasn’t good enough for automated facial recognition. Despite that, I recognized Sara and her companion, despite the hats and sunglasses they wore.

  Lacking implants, I had to scratch my head over that one for a bit. “There’s nothing there, right? That gate’s just a transshipment point.”

  She grinned. “That’s where you’re wrong, my friend. There’s a mining facility in-system. And an hour after they arrived at Leominster Station, the mining facility dispatched a transport to pick up two passengers. System logs have them listed as geologists.”

  “Wait,” I said. I pulled out Underwood’s stack of documents and flipped through them. “Sara was studying botany, according to this.”

  “Interesting, isn’t it? Her companion’s ID at Indianapolis departure listed him as Connor Johnson, of St. Louis. On the surface, it looks like a legit identity, but the deeper I dug, the shakier it got. It’s a fake, but it’s a damn good one. I could do better, but not much.”

  Frowning, I studied the blurry picture. What the hell are you up to, Sara?

  ***

  However many thousands of years ago, something truly messed up happened in the Leominster system. It’s impossible to say how many planets used to circle its lone F-class star, because they’re all rubble now. The entire system is a mess of eccentrically-orbiting rock fragments. It took a big, clanking pair of brass ones to fly into it. I can’t imagine the huevos on the dudes that actually mine the place.

  My knuckles turned white on the headrest of the pilot’s seat as Cole continuously tapped the reaction thrusters to pitch our nose out of the flight path of spinning chunks of rock.

  Here’s the thing about asteroid fields. To the naked eye, they don’t look all that much different than any other stretch of space. A storm of rocks running into one another is a conceit of old 2D movies.

  If anything, being able to see the asteroids would have made things easier. As it was, the only way to track the paths and continuously-changing positions of the tumbling hunks of planets was high-end radar tracking and a serious predictive algorithm running on state-of-the-art processing systems.

  Thankfully for us, Puller had both. Our navigation system presented the paths of the asteroids around us as a series of dashed lines in the head’s up display at the front of the bridge. Green lines indicated tracks that weren’t in our direction of travel, yellow indicated possible impacts, and red indicated real collision threats.

  Right now, the trajectories on the HUD looked like a plate of spaghetti drenched in marinara sauce. If there was a bright side, it was that none of the red tracks were flashing. That indicated an imminent collision.

  Eyes flashing over data readouts I could barely follow, Cole made ongoing adjustments to our course. The system compared the changing aspects of our route and updated the collision warnings on the fly. Red flickered to yellow and to green, and in other cases shifted in the opposite direction.

  But as we moved further in-system, the screen began to clear. The change was deliberate. I wondered if I was imagining things at first, but as Cole kept tapping, trajectories fell off the screen until all that remained were a pair of green tracks, crossing the screen in an X. Soon even those fell off, and the three of us all breathed a little easier.

  “Eye of the storm,” Cole said, quiet reverence in his tone. “I’ve read about this sort of thing.”

  “Do tell,” I managed. My hands were still shaking a bit from the nerve-wracking flight, and I settled into the seat next to Cole’s station.

  “Irregular gravitational effects in the area, maybe. Could even be a residual effect from whatever turned the system to rubble so long ago. All the fragments settled into orbits outside the immediate area.” He nodded toward an indicator on the hub. “Makes for a great place to stash a mining facility – and makes for one hell of an experience getting to it.”

  I frowned. The station was still too far away to see with the naked eye, but the radar was picking it up well enough. Masses of steel a hundred kilometers in diameter tend to do that. “Which makes no sense at all,” I pointed out. “If anything, the station should be between the wormhole bridge and the asteroid field. Why put it here unless you’ve got something you don’t want someone to get a look at?”

  A bigger vessel, pretty much any ship of the line in the UN’s fleet save for scouts, wouldn’t have much of an issue with the asteroid field. One hit and we’d have been breathing vacuum – the big boys are more compartmentalized and don’t tend to worry too much about that sort of damage. They’d still have to take it slow, of course, but maybe that was the point. As long as we’d taken to make the transit, with all the course corrections, we’d stood out a lot on any sort of long-range scan.

  And, right on time, another indicator lit up on the control panel. “Here we go,” Cole said. He toggled the comm.

  “Unidentified ship, this is Hephaestus Station. We show no arrival scheduled for your IFF. State destination and business, over.”

  I raised an eyebrow at Cole’s frowning face. Cal, impassive as ever, kept sharpening her favorite knife from her spot in the rear corner of the bridge. “Well, I’ve had less friendly welcomes, but I can’t think of many.”

  He grinned and I pushed the transmit button to record my reply. “Hephaestus, this is Bonded Recovery Specialist Reed Dyson of the Puller. Here on official business, welfare check of a missing person. Request coordinates to a docking ring, over.” I played back the message to make sure I hadn’t stuttered, then toggled the transmit key.

  Fifteen seconds later, they should have received my reply. I drummed fingers on the console, waiting, as we continued to cut into the distance.

  Fully two minutes after they should have finished listening to my response, the same voice responded, “Copy. Coordinates inbound.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Cole muttered under his breath. He pulled the coordinates up and plugged them into the n
av. “They’re legit, they’re sending us right to the main docking ring.”

  “Punch it in,” I said, settling back into my seat. “This could be interesting.”

  ***

  This time I let Cal come along. I could justify making her stay behind when I was going to an Earth-side shopping mall. No one’s ever accused me of being the sharpest tool in the shed, but no way I’m dumb enough to try and tell her I didn’t need backup, walking into a mystery mining station on the fringes of known space.

  The mass of carbon fiber and steel at my side weighed no more than a half-kilo, but it was a reassuring weight. All the kids today were on the low-cal, high-capacity kick, but I’m old-fashioned. I prefer a round with some authority to it, even if the original design was old two centuries ago. The thirteen rounds of .45-caliber ACP in the pistol’s magazine wouldn’t defeat modern body armor, but then again, neither would any of the 4mm high-velocity rounds in Cal’s Ishikawa. For that, you need a rifle, and long guns at a social function are generally considered rude.

  Not that it would matter if our welcoming crew decided to kick things off, but at least we could retreat back to the ship in that event. Cole had used the Puller’s radar to scan the station on the way in, and there were none of the usual telltales indicating external weapons mounts. That didn’t mean they weren’t there, of course, but it was a good sign if we needed to retreat and get the hell out of Dodge.

  Hand on the button to cycle the airlock, I gave Cal a nod and took her measure. She gave me a lazy shrug and waved a hand for me to get on with it. Suppressing a grin, I hit the switch and waited for the door to rumble open on the station side. A rush of air hit me in the face as atmospheres equalized. Much to my surprise, the air was almost fresh, with a pleasant scent to it that I couldn’t place. It seemed odd to waste resources on fresheners in such a rough and ready place, but I put the thought aside for the moment.

  Two staff members waited on the other side. One was a big, stereotypical mining sort in a patched orange jumpsuit. The other was an administrative-type who had an obviously nervous look on his face. Resisting the urge to check the sides – that was Cal’s job, after all – I stepped forward and offered a hand to the nervous chap.