Belt Three

by John Ayliff

  He had an idea. Jonas had years of experience with servitor programming, from his time as an Administrator. Keldra didn’t know that, so she wouldn’t expect him to know some of the tricks he did. The servitor combat programme wouldn’t be any use while the ship was being boarded, but if he could save it for the right moment…

  A shudder ran through the ship as the pirate’s docking lines locked on. The pirates would cut through the Dancer’s cargo bay door and enter the ring through the cargo airlock.

  He walked over to Ayla’s chair. ‘Ayla, hold still.’

  She looked up, startled but obedient. Jonas put a hand on her shoulder and held the programming spike to the back of her neck, just below the base of her skull. Her eyes glazed over as the spike momentarily took control of her pilot implant. He tapped in his Administrator override code and then loaded the combat programme into the implant’s free space. ‘Prepare to enter dormant mode,’ he said, speaking to the combat programme through Ayla’s ears. ‘Verbal re-activation, my voice, password…’ He searched for a word. ‘Oberon.’

  The implant blinked Ayla’s eyes twice, acknowledging its new instructions.

  ‘Short-term memory wipe. One minute.’ If this was to work, it was better that Ayla didn’t know. ‘Enter dormant mode now.’

  She swayed as the implant released control. Jonas kept his hand on her shoulder to steady her.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I think you blacked out for a moment.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  He held the pilot’s gaze. ‘You have nothing to be sorry for.’ He nearly told her that it was his fault, but then stopped himself: she would respond that it wasn’t, and he would be fishing for her forgiveness for what he was about to do. These were her last moments as a free-willed human being and he had no right to make them about him. Instead, he said, ‘you were the best pilot I’ve worked with, and it’s been an honour flying with you.’

  There were tears in her eyes, but she managed to smile.

  There was a noise outside the door. It sounded like the pirates had reached it, and were preparing to blow the lock. There was no point resisting now. Jonas pressed the door release.

  A pirate walked in, a large man dressed in an armoured vacuum suit. A servitor; he walked with a robotic gait, and his face inside the visor was expressionless. He scanned the room with a pistol and then fired quick bursts at Jonas and Ayla.

  Jonas’s muscles seized up painfully, rooting him to the spot. A nerve gun, set for paralysis. He could move his eyes and facial muscles a little, but nothing else. The servitor lowered the gun and gave a hand signal to someone in the corridor.

  Captain Keldra strode into the room, followed by a second servitor. She was tall, and from the way she was built Jonas guessed she had been raised in at least half gravity, probably more. She wore a yellow armoured vacuum suit, but her helmet was clipped to her belt, leaving her head arrogantly unprotected. She looked around the room critically, then pointed at Ayla.

  ‘Spike her.’

  Jonas could see the helpless panic in Ayla’s eyes as the first servitor produced an enslavement spike and walked up to her. The servitor held the spike to the back of her neck and there was an unpleasant organic sound as it injected a servitor implant. Her eyes moved wildly for a moment, and she twitched, muscle spasms fighting against the paralysis, as the servitor implant systematically destroyed her higher brain functions and installed its own tendrils in their place. The pirate servitor touched her with an anti-paralyzer but she remained motionless, her mind gone.

  Keldra pointed at Jonas. ‘Search him for weapons, and cuff him.’

  The first servitor kept Jonas covered with a nerve gun while the second patted him down for weapons, put a pair of cuffs on his wrists, and then released him from the paralysis. Keldra watched smugly.

  ‘Make sure your ransom is worth more than the trouble you give me,’ she said.

  Jonas nodded silently. He intended to cause her a great deal of trouble – and she’d be getting no ransom, in any case – but for now he had to bide his time.

  Keldra’s nerve gun dug into his back as she marched him around the orbital corridor. Any last-ditch resistance the crew had put up was over, and pirates were already beginning to strip equipment from the walls. The pirates were all servitors; he couldn’t see any free-willed humans among Keldra’s crew.

  They passed a group of newly mind-wiped mining foremen putting on vacuum suits in preparation for the transfer to the other ship. Keldra prodded Ayla to join them. Now was the moment. Jonas waited a calculated second, and then rushed forward as dramatically as he could.

  ‘Ayla! Where are you taking her?’

  Keldra grabbed his arm and brought him round to face her. ‘Oh, was she yours?’ she asked. ‘Was she special?’ The cruel smirk was back on her face, as he had hoped. ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure I can find a buyer for a pretty young thing like that.’

  She let out a little snorting laugh and undid his cuffs as a servitor pushed a patched and blood-stained vacuum suit into his hands. Jonas kept his eyes on Ayla for as long as he could while he donned the suit, trying to look desperate and dejected. He had to let Keldra think she could use Ayla to hurt him. From the smug look on the pirate’s face, he thought he had succeeded.

  They climbed a ladder to the centre of the cargo bay, their weight dropping off until they were in microgravity. Across the gap, the Remembrance of Clouds kept station with the Dancer, its two grav-rings casting spokes of shadow across its cargo bay. The Dancer’s bay was emptying as Keldra’s servitors sent cargo containers along the lines to the pirate ship. She put the cuffs back on Jonas and then clipped them to a personnel transfer line. As it hauled them along, they passed a pair of servitors manoeuvring uranium ore canisters across the gap.

  ‘You should have fought,’ Keldra said, suddenly.

  ‘What?’ Jonas said.

  She pressed the nerve gun against his back. The shock couldn’t penetrate the vacuum suit, but the pointed tip of the weapon pressed in painfully. ‘You ran,’ she said. ‘You people always run. You should have fought.’

  Chapter Two

  The prison cell was a converted cargo container a few metres wide. There were three light strips in the ceiling, but only one of them worked, so the room was filled with an eye-straining half-light. A hard-angled metal bed was bolted to the floor, and in the corner was the sealed box of a chemical toilet.

  Jonas got up slowly, still nauseous from the nerve gun paralysis, and rubbed his wrists where the cuffs had dug in. He felt heavy: he estimated the ring’s gravity was close to one gee, much more than he would have expected on a pirate ship. There was a little barred window in the cell door, through which he could see a brightly lit corridor and a security camera bolted to the opposite wall. He pressed his face to the bars to see as far as he could into the corridor, but he couldn’t see any guards, or any other sign of life. The only sound was the faint rattle and gurgle of the ship’s systems.

  He lay down on the bed. After what he guessed was an hour the vibration changed in tone, and the room seemed to tip sideways as a gentle new acceleration dragged him towards the wall. The Remembrance of Clouds was unfurling its sail and pulling away from whatever it had left of the Coriolis Dancer.

  Sometime later he heard footsteps in the corridor. A slot at the bottom of the door opened and a tray of food slid in. He waited, but the footsteps did not depart. When he sat up on the bed he saw a face, dark against the window.

  ‘You should have fought,’ Keldra said.

  He didn’t move. He had expected her to come to gloat, although he hadn’t expected her so soon. He glowered up at the door for a moment but said nothing. He wanted her to be angry at him, and for now the best way to achieve that would be to ignore her.

  ‘Eat!’ she commanded.

  ‘What have you done with Ayla?’ he asked.

  Keldra let out a snorting laugh. ‘Eat!’

&nb
sp; ‘If you want obedience, why don’t you spike me?’

  ‘Don’t tempt me. I bet your family would pay something just for your body.’

  Jonas went to the tray and picked it up. Keldra’s face was close to the bars. He examined her, keeping his face controlled.

  ‘If you spiked me, you’d have no one to talk to,’ he said. ‘We’re the only free-willed people on the ship.’ A subtle movement of her eyes told him he was right.

  He sat down and began to eat. It was the tasteless, nutritious slop that servitors were fed. He grimaced, deliberately, as if he were used to only the finest true-born cuisine.

  ‘You should have fought.’ Keldra banged on the door, making him jump. ‘Look at me!’

  He lay the spoon across the bowl and sat up haughtily. ‘You have no right to keep a true-born like this.’

  That set her off. ‘You think you’re better than the rest of us. You’re not. You’re just a spoiled ruling class.’

  ‘You’re just a clone. My ancestors walked on Earth.’

  Keldra thumped the door again, making the cell rattle. ‘You know nothing about Earth! I’m closer to Earth than any true-born. I’m a genetic duplicate of someone who lived on Earth.’

  ‘You’re a clone. What’s your name, clone? Your full name?’

  ‘To hell with you.’

  ‘You don’t have a name. You have a serial number. You were made.’

  Keldra was leaning close to the bars, as if she were the one locked up. She seemed like a caged animal that might tear the door open at any moment. Making her angry was almost too easy. Had she come down here looking for a shouting match?

  ‘I’ll tell you my name,’ she said. ‘Keldra 2482-Pandora-33842, Engineer.’

  Assuming it was true, that made Keldra 28-years-old. He hadn’t heard of Pandora, but there were a lot of minor Belt Three cities he didn’t know.

  ‘I am Gabriel Dominic Ellis Reinhardt,’ he said, slowly emphasizing each name. ‘I can trace my family tree back to people named Reinhardt and Ellis who lived on Earth. You have no such continuity. You have a serial number, clone.’

  ‘You’ve got a past but no future. You’re letting the human race die.’

  ‘True-borns are the only ones that matter.’

  ‘You’re letting them win!’ Keldra shouted. ‘In a few hundred years the Worldbreakers will have destroyed everything. There’ll be nowhere for us to live.’

  ‘There’s nothing we can do. You can’t beat the Worldbreakers. We’re living at the end of the human race.’

  Keldra banged on the cell door again. ‘You should have fought!’ She disappeared from the bars and her footsteps echoed away along the corridor.

  ‘Don’t hurt Ayla!’ Jonas shouted after her. ‘I want her back!’

  A few hours later the lights abruptly went off. Jonas lay on the bed and tried to sleep. The cell was cold but stuffy, the air not circulating properly. The faint sound he could hear resolved itself into a dozen different ship systems: rattles, hums, rhythmic thuds, and a trickle of water that sounded as though it came from just beyond the wall. There was a gentle, regular swaying sensation, as if the grav-rings were not quite properly aligned.

  He still didn’t know if he had judged Keldra’s personality correctly. She seemed so volatile that he couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t forget about the ransom and slave-spike him in a fit of anger.

  Six years ago he’d promised to do something worthwhile with Gabriel Reinhardt’s name. He had set out to prove that he could run a successful business while treating his tank-born employees decently, or at least better than the exploitation that was the norm. Not exactly a grand dream, now he thought about it, but even there he had failed. Gabriel Reinhardt’s uranium-mining business had survived but had not prospered. Jonas had found himself living day-to-day, plans to do more pushed to the back of his mind. Now the double blow of Worldbreaker and pirate had ended even that, his employees were dead, and there was no goal left for him but to escape and survive.

  At least he had a chance of doing that. Keldra was volatile, but if he trod carefully his plan should still work. Soon he would be free, and then he could think about what to do next.

  Jonas had guessed right. When another tray rattled through the slot the next morning, the face at the bars was the expressionless servitor that had been Ayla. Jonas ran up to the door. Keldra stood behind the servitor, smirking, a nerve gun in her hand.

  Servitor-Ayla remained at the door after delivering the tray, giving Jonas a chance to look at her. Her face was bruised, one eye half-closed from the swelling, and he could smell blood from where Keldra had beaten her. He reminded himself that Ayla’s personality had died the moment Keldra had slave-spiked her, so she was no longer suffering, but that didn’t make the bruises any easier to look at. She had been a brilliant young woman with so much potential, but the only place his society had found for her was as a living control system for a mining hauler. Worse, she had accepted that place, humbly buying into the belief that true-borns were her natural superiors and her role was to serve them. Jonas had tried to tell her that he wasn’t better than her, but she hadn’t listened. Now his decisions had led to her personality death and the mutilation of her still-living body. At least it would soon be over and, if his plan worked, she would be avenged.

  He leaned close to the bars, and let the emotion he was feeling show on his face. He had to give Keldra this triumph to make her feel secure. He glanced left and right. Keldra and Servitor-Ayla were alone in the corridor.

  Keldra let out a little laugh. ‘You know, there are some theories that consciousness survives a mind-wipe. It has no control, but it can perceive what’s happening. Your Ayla could know exactly what I’ve been doing to her.’

  Jonas pressed his face against the bars, and whispered.

  ‘Oberon.’

  Servitor-Ayla blinked twice. Her original pilot implant, now running his combat programme, had a deep connection to her brain, and quickly wrested control of her body from the more recent slave implant. He stepped back from the door, and Servitor-Ayla’s eyes followed him. He nodded in Keldra’s direction.

  ‘Neutralize her.’

  Keldra started to react, but not quickly enough. Servitor-Ayla spun around fluidly and landed a kick squarely in her stomach. As Keldra reeled, Servitor-Ayla neatly struck her hand, sending the nerve gun clattering across the corridor. Keldra swung at the servitor, but clumsily. Servitor-Ayla placed one more sharp blow to Keldra’s neck and the pirate collapsed against the wall.

  Jonas grinned, triumphant.

  ‘Get this door open.’

  He saw how the door locked when Keldra had put him in: there was nothing electronic, just a big manual lever that released the bolts. The unarmed combat programme should be able to follow his instruction.

  Servitor-Ayla ducked out of sight. A second later the door swung open.

  Keldra was moving sluggishly, winded but not unconscious. Jonas grabbed the nerve gun from where it had fallen, clicked the slider up to ‘kill’, and levelled it at the pirate. There was no fear in her eyes, only anger, as if she were daring him to kill her.

  He closed the trigger and held it closed as Keldra convulsed, muscle spasms making her limbs flail in unnatural directions. He kept the trigger closed until she lay still. She wasn’t breathing. The nerve gun should have stopped her heart.

  Jonas felt sick. The hand that held the nerve gun shook uncontrollably, and the corridor seemed to spin around him. He closed his eyes and tried to control his breathing, but when he opened them the body was still there. He should have felt pleasure at having avenged Ayla and the others, and won his chance at freedom, but all he felt were nausea and guilt. He had never killed anyone before, and now he knew he was capable of it.

  He looked away from the body and managed to stop shaking and think clearly. He could reassess his moral compass later, once he knew he was safe. He looked up and down the corridor, trying to orient himself with what little he knew of a Salamander’s la
yout. If he reached the bridge he should be able to take control of the ship and put it on course for a friendly city. The bridge would be in the first grav-ring, and he was fairly sure he was in the second. If he headed around the ring he should come to a transport hub, eventually. He gestured Servitor-Ayla to follow him.

  The bulkhead door at the end of the corridor was open. Beyond was a dim storage area, large enough that the far end was hidden behind the grav-ring’s ceiling horizon. The corridor ran between transparent partitions, on the other side of which deactivated servitors knelt in neat rows like Scriber cultists at prayer. Jonas recognized some of them as his mining servitors and the former crew of the Dancer; a few of them wore bruises where they had tried to resist capture. Their down-turned faces were corpse-like in the bluish light.

  They were some way along the corridor when Jonas saw movement. A ripple of sharp twitches passed along the rows of servitors as their implants activated them. They began rising to their feet, each making the same smooth, compact movements. Doors in the partitions slid aside.

  Jonas looked around in panic. Someone was in control and trying to stop him. He must have read Keldra incorrectly when he had guessed that she was the only free-willed person on the ship. He looked for controls to the partition doors, but none were visible. The servitors were on their feet now. The ends of the corridor were beyond the grav-ring ceiling horizon in both directions, so he didn’t know which end was closest. He broke into a run, towards the far end of the corridor, away from the prison cell.

  The partition doors were fully open now. A servitor stepped into his path, massive hands outstretched. He had been a mining servitor, and was still wearing the Reinhardt Industries uniform. Jonas raised the nerve gun and fired. The servitor convulsed and fell, but two more were already stepping out into the corridor behind him. Their movements were uncoordinated: it looked as though they had only a basic non-combat programme. He fired wild bursts along the corridor and shouldered past the servitors as they fell.