Belt Three

by John Ayliff

  The bulkhead door to the next corridor section was in sight now. Jonas kept firing, pushing past bodies, and fighting off clumsy, grasping hands. The door was locked, but there was a manual override behind an emergency panel. He pushed down on the lever, putting all his weight behind it. The door resisted for a moment, then sprang open, revealing a grey corridor mercifully free of servitors.

  Servitor-Ayla was a few metres behind Jonas, the combat programme fighting its way through the other servitors easily, delivering swift chops precisely to their nerve points. He fired into the throng, clearing a path for her, until she was in reach, and then grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her through. He shut the door and engaged the emergency hard lock. A minute later there was a series of thuds as the servitors banged ineffectually on the door. He rested his head on the steel wall and paused for a moment, fighting to get his breathing under control.

  He had reached the ring’s transit hub. The door to the transit module tube was closed, and lighted icons indicated that the modules were elsewhere in the ship. Whoever was in charge of the servitors would no doubt prevent him from recalling one. His plan for taking control of the ship had already failed. He needed a way out.

  Each ring should have its own set of escape shuttles, and they were normally close to the ring’s transit hub. After a few moments Jonas found the door he needed.

  The shuttle bay was cramped, with vacuum suit racks and tool lockers running along its walls. In the floor were four circular airlock hatches. Between them, through thick, foggy windows, the coffin-like shapes of the shuttles were visible, clamped in their recesses in the outer hull.

  Like the doors, shuttle control had a local override, a fail-safe so that the crew could evacuate in the case of a ship-wide malfunction. There was even a local belt display based on the shuttle bay’s own lidar. At the moment it showed a binary pair of rocks, the smaller of which had a habitation beacon. Jonas grinned. If he could reach that outpost he would be home free.

  An intercom on the control board crackled to life.

  ‘That’s as far as you get, true-born.’ The voice was breathless and uneven, but it was Keldra’s. She sounded as if she was running.

  Jonas leaned in to the intercom. ‘How did you survive?’

  ‘This ship won’t let me die.’

  He stabbed the controls to prep one of the shuttles for launch. ‘I’ve got shuttle control. You can’t stop me leaving.’

  ‘I’ve got fire control. If you launch one of those shuttles I’ll blow it out of space.’

  He hesitated. ‘You wouldn’t. You want me alive for ransom.’

  ‘You think I make empty threats?’

  A chime sounded to signal that launch prep was done, and a hatch hissed open. Jonas stared at the cramped, cocoon-like space beyond. With the system running on local override, there was no way to launch a shuttle except from inside it.

  Servitor-Ayla was standing behind him, obedient and alert, the combat programme scanning the room for threats to its master. Her face was expressionless; the woman behind it was already dead.

  ‘Servitor,’ Jonas said slowly, ‘go into that shuttle and use the launch control.’

  Servitor-Ayla paused, and, for a moment, Jonas thought that the command to launch a shuttle had been too complex for the combat programme, but then she walked forward and climbed through the hatch. Jonas watched through the floor window as the clamps released and the shuttle fell away from the hull, drifting to one side as the Coriolis effect took it away from the shuttle bay. Ayla was visible momentarily through the tiny filtered window, before the thrusters fired and the shuttle dwindled to a point.

  A missile streaked across the window. The shuttle exploded into a million glittering shards.

  Jonas punched the side of the control panel in frustration. Now there was nowhere he could run. Involuntarily, he thought back to what Keldra had said about consciousness surviving a mind-wipe. He knew it wasn’t true, but if it was, then letting her destroy Ayla’s body had been the most merciful thing.

  The door from the corridor opened. Jonas turned just in time to see Keldra powering across the floor towards him. Before he could move she grabbed his throat and slammed him against the wall.

  ‘You don’t steal from a thief.’

  He wriggled in her grip. She pulled upwards, choking him and nearly lifting him off his feet. A pair of burly servitors entered behind her and trained their nerve guns on him.

  ‘You don’t steal from a thief,’ she repeated. ‘You steal from a business owner, they have insurance, they have law enforcement. They have their true-born family to help them out. A thief doesn’t have all that.’ Her grip tightened, making his eyes water. ‘You steal from a thief and they’ll hunt you down and kill you as a warning to everyone else, because you don’t steal from a thief. You don’t steal from me.’ She released him and he doubled over, gasping. ‘Why didn’t you wait? I could ransom you to your family. That’s the way this normally goes.’

  Jonas lay against the wall, feeling his throat. He could taste blood in his mouth. The game was up; she had already shown she was prepared to kill him rather than let him escape. He might as well tell the truth for once.

  ‘I’m not a true-born,’ he croaked.

  Keldra delivered a swift kick to his ribs. ‘What’s your name, clone?’

  ‘Jonas 2477-Athens-20219, Administrator.’

  She kicked him again, less hard this time. ‘Bastard. I lost a good shuttle because of you.’ She looked down at him, calculating. ‘What happened? How’d you get where you are?’

  ‘Gabriel Reinhardt was a Scriber. He Immolated six years ago. The Belt Three branch of Reinhardt Industries should have passed to his next of kin, but…’

  ‘You took over.’ She smiled slyly. Was that admiration Jonas saw on her face, or did she just like the thought of a true-born family being screwed over?

  ‘I was his personal assistant, so I had access to nearly everything,’ he said. ‘I fired all the staff who knew his face, and rebuilt the business. His family’s up in Belt Four. He didn’t talk to them much, and they never knew he was a Scriber.’

  ‘But if I ransomed you to them, they’d know you weren’t him. Hah.’ Keldra was still looking thoughtful, as if sizing him up for something. ‘You’d still have been living like that if that Worldbreaker hadn’t shown up. You must hate the Worldbreakers.’

  ‘Hate the Worldbreakers?’ Jonas looked up, incredulous, trying to work out if she was serious. ‘I hate you, you damn pirate! There’s no point hating the Worldbreakers. They’re just there. There’s nothing we can do about them.’

  Keldra grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him to his feet, her eyes flaring with a resurgence of anger. ‘No point. Nothing we can do,’ she mimicked acidly. She thrust his face into the local belt display. ‘Do you know what that rock is?’

  The local belt display showed two bodies near the Remembrance of Clouds. One of them was flagged as having a habitation beacon, but the display did not show any more information; the other was dark, visible only as a lidar trace. A pair of rocks orbiting a common centre, one of which was inhabited: any number of outposts in the belts matched that description.

  ‘What? No. It could be anywhere.’

  ‘It’s LN-411.’

  ‘But LN-411’s a lone rock, it doesn’t have…oh God.’ An awful chill ran through his body, quite different from the mundane fear of enslavement by a pirate. The other rock was the Worldbreaker.

  Chapter Three

  Keldra put the cuffs on Jonas’s wrists and marched him to the transit hub, once again jamming the nerve gun into his back. The transit module could take half a dozen people, but she dismissed her servitors and entered with Jonas alone. He noticed a slave-spike among the tools hanging from her belt as she strapped herself into the acceleration harness opposite him. He had no idea why she didn’t use it.

  He felt the gravity drop away as the module travelled up to the ship’s spine, then return as it moved outward
s to the first ring. There were no servitors waiting when the door opened, and Jonas saw none as Keldra prodded him along a corridor to the bridge.

  Jonas had seen a Salamander’s bridge before so he could tell that this one was heavily modified. All but one of the crew terminals had been ripped out, making the room seem larger than it normally would, and it was dominated by the holo-screen taking up the front wall. Right now the screen showed an external view centred on the red-brown dot of LN-411.

  In the centre of the room was what Jonas could only think of as a nest. A chaotic arrangement of screens and control boards formed a half-circle around a battered captain’s chair, whose padding leaked through splits unevenly patched with black tape. The control boards were stained, and every empty surface held a foil food tray or empty stim pill packet.

  The ceiling was painted dark blue with streaks and splotches of pale grey. He thought, for a moment, that it was an abstract pattern, before he realized what it depicted: clouds. The sky of old Earth, or at least Keldra’s guess of how it would have looked. The paintwork was rough, with great scrawled brush strokes, not like the neat work of a servitor painting programme. Jonas was sure that she had painted it herself.

  Keldra glanced at one of the screens on her control nest. ‘We’re just in time.’

  The view on the bridge screen zoomed in. The familiar crags of LN-411 loomed large, dotted with the docking scaffolds and solar panel arrays of Jonas’s abandoned mining operation. Beside the rock floated the fragile-looking white ovoid of a Scriber Immolation ship. Keldra hadn’t touched the controls. Her full name had indicated she was Engineer-caste, but she must be controlling the ship using a pilot implant.

  Beyond LN-411 another object was visible, much larger than the rock but totally black. Its shape was hard to make out against the stars, but Jonas knew what it was. A regular dodecahedron, a little more than fifty kilometres across, each face a flat plane composed of an exotic material that absorbed almost all radiation, leaving it utterly black and cold. He felt a chill run through him. He had seen recordings, but he had never been this close to a Worldbreaker before.

  Keldra had climbed into her nest and was leaning forward in the chair, a grin of anticipation on her face.

  ‘You like to watch them eat?’ Jonas asked. ‘That’s sick.’

  Keldra didn’t react to the insult. Whatever was going through her head was more important to her than being angry with him.

  ‘Any moment now,’ she said.

  A spot of pale green light appeared in the middle of the dark mass and spread into a thin five-pointed star, whose arms began to thicken. One of the Worldbreaker’s faces had split into five triangular petals that were opening outwards, and the light was shining from inside, creating a tenuous beam in the rock dust surrounding LN-411. The beam began to sparkle as bits of the rock broke off and streamed into the Worldbreaker’s flickering pentagonal maw. Jonas watched the Scriber ship as it drifted into the beam and vanished in a puff of orange flame.

  After about ten seconds the near surface of the rock glowed green and then crumbled inwards, the solar panels shattering. The Worldbreaker beam had worked its way through, obliterating in moments the installations that Jonas’s workers had taken months to carve out of the rock. The last few fragments fell into the Worldbreaker’s mouth and disappeared, and the light shut off. Dimly, Jonas could see the five petals starting to close.

  ‘Now watch this.’ Keldra raised her hand with two fingers extended, miming a gun, and pointed it at the Worldbreaker. ‘Pow!’ She fired, swinging her arm expansively.

  A white rocket trail flared on the bridge screen and receded, gathering speed towards the Worldbreaker. Through the glare, Jonas could just make out the missile itself: ugly and asymmetrical, looking as though it had been made out of scavenged parts. The shell looked like one of the Reinhardt Industries uranium ore canisters.

  Jonas frowned. The sight of a uranium symbol on a missile reminded him of something from Planetary Age history. ‘Is that a nuclear missile?’

  Keldra shot him a momentary approving look. She seemed excited. ‘I told you. You should have fought!’

  The missile dwindled to a white point that curved into the Worldbreaker’s mouth. The petals were still closing slowly. Jonas’s heart pounded. What if the Worldbreaker turned its beam on them? But Worldbreakers never reacted to people. Keldra was staring at the screen, teeth bared like some prehistoric hunter, waiting for the moment…

  There was a bloom of white light from inside the throat, and then the Worldbreaker cracked open. Massive pieces of debris spun away, and from the centre, a cloud of glowing green gas spilled out and began to fade. Keldra punched the air.

  ‘Yes!’

  Jonas stared in disbelief. ‘You killed it.’

  ‘I’ve killed six of them now.’ She glanced between Jonas and the screen and spoke rapidly, her words tumbling over one another in her excitement. ‘There’s a window, after the beam shuts off but before the mouth closes. Normal weapons weren’t enough, so I found out how to build a nuke. I’ve got my own enrichment plant here on the ship.’

  ‘You killed it,’ Jonas said again. The green cloud had faded away now. The Worldbreaker and LN-411 were both gone, their remains visible only as a flickering blackness where the debris passed in front of the stars. Jonas watched in silence as it dispersed.

  Keldra tapped at a couple of her control boards and the ship began to turn, aligning itself to a new course. Still radiating triumph, she swung herself out of the control nest and grabbed the enslavement spike from her belt.

  ‘All right, show’s over.’

  Jonas sighed, and let his shoulders droop, relaxed. He’d been resigned to this since he’d seen Ayla’s shuttle explode. ‘At least I got to see a Worldbreaker die.’

  She put a hand on Jonas’s shoulder and pressed the spike to the back of his neck, where his skull met his spine. He felt a sharp pain as the implant spike broke the skin, then dizziness, then his vision blurred and he blacked out.

  Keldra’s face swam back into focus. Jonas flexed his fingers and found that they responded. He blinked, trying to clear his head. ‘You didn’t wipe me,’ he said.

  ‘The implant’s in dormant mode. I just need to say the word and you’re wiped.’

  He rubbed his wrists. The cuffs were gone.

  ‘There are some other triggers too,’ Keldra continued. ‘If you try to hurt me, even indirectly, it’ll knock you out. If you’re off the ship for more than twenty-four hours without my say so, it’ll kill you.’

  ‘Sounds pretty foolproof,’ he said. With his mind still foggy he couldn’t think of a way around the restrictions, and those were just the restrictions Keldra was telling him about. ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘You nearly killed me. I’ve got a system in place to monitor my vitals, so servitors came and revived me. But you nearly beat me. That means you’ve got skills I can use.’

  He nodded slowly. That was true, but he didn’t think it was the real reason. ‘And you want someone to talk to,’ he said.

  That threw her. She glared at him, but said nothing.

  ‘You want someone to talk to, and you want someone to watch. Don’t you? Killing that Worldbreaker was sweeter because someone saw you do it.’

  She glanced up at the painted clouds. ‘They stole from you as well.’ She put her hand on the nerve gun at her hip, and a sideways jerk of her head directed him to the door.

  Keldra took Jonas around the ring to the crew living area. They went through a lounge, where a threadbare couch faced a big wall-screen, and a dining room with a doorway through which a cluttered kitchen was visible. The next corridor had eight cabin doors leading off it, and they looked like part of the original ship design, not later modifications. Being pilot as well as captain was meant to burn people out with the overload of responsibilities, but he thought Keldra must be doing the jobs of half a dozen other people, as well.

  She bundled him into one of the cabins. ‘I’ll be back for yo
u later.’ She shut the door, and he heard the mechanism click as the hard lock engaged.

  The cabin was not much larger than the prison cell, but it had more comforts. There was a padded bunk built into the wall, and a water-conserving shower. There was a desk terminal, but it didn’t respond when Jonas pressed its power button. He checked under the desk and found that the terminal had been gutted, the parts no doubt finding their way into Keldra’s nest or some other modification project elsewhere in the ship.

  He sat at the useless desk and idly fingered the back of his neck where Keldra had injected the implant. He thought he could feel something, numbness, or an irregularity of the skin, but he knew it was his imagination. An implant injection wound was undetectable.

  He had to find some way to escape from her, and now it meant escaping from the implant’s control as well. He wondered briefly if some of the implant programming she mentioned had been a bluff, but dismissed the idea. He knew enough implant engineering to know that everything Keldra had said was possible, and he didn’t think that she was one to bluff, not for any length of time. It wasn’t that she was honest, but he didn’t think she was subtle, either.

  He needed to escape from her, and, more than that, he wanted to defeat her, to avenge the deaths of his crew. He tried to channel that anger, to make something useful of it, to formulate a plan, but he couldn’t concentrate. All he could think of was the sight of the Scriber ship vanishing into the green beam, and the Worldbreaker cracking apart.

  An hour later the door lock clicked and Keldra opened it without knocking. When Jonas got up, she threw a bundle into his arms. Frayed blue servitor overalls, with the logo of some minor freight company on the shoulder.

  He tossed the clothes onto the bed. ‘You want me to get changed now?’

  ‘No. Come with me.’

  He followed her into the corridor as she stalked off. ‘You can’t win, you know,’ he called after her.

  ‘What?’