Belt Three

by John Ayliff

  Jonas looked around. A man was coming up the steps to the viewing area. He wore a gaudy kimono draped with gold jewellery, on top of which, his bald head seemed to perch like an egg. Jonas stood and put on a nervous expression, as if impressed by his host’s expensive tastes. Cooper was standing as well, but not bothering to hide his distaste.

  ‘My guests!’ exclaimed Wendell Taylor Glass. ‘I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.’

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ said Jonas, moving forward to shake Glass’s hand. ‘Naturally, you must be busy.’

  ‘Taylor Glass,’ said Lance Hussein Cooper. ‘My grandmother was a Taylor. A distinguished family.’

  ‘Oh, then we are cousins!’ said Glass, shaking Cooper’s hand vigorously. ‘You are part of the family!’

  Cooper’s expression was cool and dismissive. ‘Nearly everyone’s part of an extended family these days. At least, those of us who have kept the bloodline pure.’

  ‘Oh, very nearly pure,’ Glass said, squirming just slightly under Cooper’s gaze. ‘Of course, I can’t deny I have a little tank-born blood, just a little, a long way back. But that can’t be helped now, I mean, I can’t be held responsible for what my ancestors…’ He trailed off, withering under Cooper’s gaze. ‘I would never allow another tank-born into the family line,’ he said.

  Jonas glanced at Emily. A hint of a frown seemed to cross her face for a moment, but it might have been his imagination. She stared at the gladiators, ignoring the men talking behind her. The male gladiator had sustained another wound and was moving more slowly, but the female was still circling rather than moving in for the kill.

  ‘I’ve always been very interested in Earth, as well, you know,’ Wendell Glass said. ‘Keeping the old knowledge alive, the old arts, all that. You must see my collection.’

  ‘Maybe later,’ Cooper said.

  ‘Of course.’ Wendell Glass sat and peered down into the ring. ‘It looks like I’m in time for the end of the match. How delightful. Do finish it quickly, my dear Emily, and then we can get down to business.’

  Emily looked up at her father with sunken eyes, and then leaned over the little control panel built into the stone balcony in front of her. Her finger hovered over two buttons for a moment before stabbing down on one of them. The male gladiator froze, his implant shutting off the combat programme and paralyzing him. The female moved in step by step, her combat programme no doubt running through scenarios of feints and bluffs. She grabbed the man, plunged her knife in, and cut downwards, scoring a deep wound from the bottom of his ribcage down to his pelvis. When she pulled the knife back, her hand was dripping blood.

  Rather than releasing her dying opponent, the female gladiator put an arm around him and lugged him over to the viewing area. They disappeared from Jonas’s sight for a moment, but then a whirring mechanized platform raised them up so that their heads appeared over the balcony. The male’s head lolled sideways, drooling, eyes closed. The female stared straight ahead, looking even deader.

  Emily Taylor Glass had slipped on a pair of silver gloves linked by thick wires to her memduction helmet. She leaned forward and put one hand on the head of each of the gladiators. Lights flickered on the gloves and on the helmet, and Emily’s eyes moved as if in a dream-filled sleep. The gloves would be pulling recent memories from the gladiators’ implants and she would be reliving the fight from each gladiator’s point of view, simultaneously experiencing the motions of victory and the agony of the shock-knife slicing through flesh and the damaged body failing. The briefest flicker of a smile passed across her face. Done with the gladiators, Emily pushed them aside. They stood patiently, the woman supporting her dying opponent.

  Wendell Taylor Glass had put on a memduction helmet and gloves. He grabbed the gladiators’ heads and made a sucking sound, as if taking the memories like snuff. Jonas noticed that only the glove on the victor’s head activated. When he was done, he gestured to the helmets on stands in front of Jonas and Captain Cooper. ‘You’re not going to partake?’

  ‘I don’t use any neural technology,’ Cooper said coldly.

  ‘Ah, er, of course,’ Wendell stammered. ‘You, perhaps, Mr Reinhardt?’

  Jonas shook his head. ‘A little strong for my tastes.’ He was relieved he wasn’t the only one declining.

  ‘Of course. My daughter does have a penchant for rather, ah, intense memory experiences, don’t you, my dear?’

  Emily sullenly ignored him. With another few button presses she lowered the platform, and summoned another pair of servitors to take the defeated gladiator’s body away.

  ‘Now, to business.’ Glass took off his memduction helmet and clicked his fingers to summon a servitor with a glass of dark red wine. After taking a sip of the drink his composure seemed to return, and he beamed playfully as he looked between Jonas and the Captain. ‘I was expecting one guest this evening, but it seems I have two! To what do I owe the pleasure of your company, Mr Reinhardt?’

  ‘I have some items for sale I thought might interest you. Some servitors and a hab system core.’ Jonas produced the wafer-pad storage ticket and activated its live feed. It showed a grainy black-and-white image of the servitors floating around the hab system core in one of the docking spindle’s storage bays.

  ‘Interesting,’ Glass said, barely glancing at the pad. ‘A pleasant opportunity. I’m afraid I will have to ask you to wait. I have very important business with Captain Cooper that I want to settle as soon as possible. Please, help yourself to a drink. You could take a pleasure servitor, or perhaps some more gladiatorial games…’

  ‘You should deal with Mr Reinhardt first,’ Cooper said. It sounded more like an order than a suggestion. ‘Our business may take some time.’

  ‘I, er, of course,’ Glass said. He took another gulp of his wine and then wiped his head with a silk handkerchief. Captain Cooper sat back, watching the exchange.

  ‘Tell me about this hab module,’ Glass said.

  Jonas reeled off the module’s technical specifications, with only the amount of creative omission that would be expected when making a sale. ‘It’s two years old; I bought it first-hand on Oberon. I used it as the main hab system of a mining outpost.’

  ‘Ah, and what became of this mining outpost, to put the module on the market so suddenly?’

  ‘I had to evacuate because of a Worldbreaker,’ Jonas said, trying to keep his voice nonchalant.

  ‘Ah, how terrible.’

  ‘You have my commiserations,’ Cooper said formally.

  ‘Yes, quite, and mine as well,’ Glass said.

  Jonas smiled as if the loss of LN-411 had been nothing more than a minor financial inconvenience, pushing his memories of the frantic evacuation and the subsequent battle with Keldra to the back of his mind. ‘That’s just how life is,’ he said.

  ‘Such is life, such is life, indeed,’ Glass said. ‘I certainly think I can give you something for the hab module, to help a fellow true-born back on his feet.’ He glanced at Cooper as he spoke, but the captain’s face didn’t betray a reaction. ‘What of these servitors? A hab system core is always useful, of course, but as you can see, I have no shortage of bodies.’

  Jonas hesitated, conscious of Cooper in the corner of his vision. The story of illegal servitors might not play so well with a Solar Authority captain as it would with Wendell Taylor Glass, but he didn’t think Cooper was one to care, as long as the victims were tank-borns. He smiled conspiratorially. ‘These are more than just bodies. They have servitor implants on top of learned mining-supervision skills with years of free-willed experience. I was told that this wouldn’t be a problem here.’

  Glass glanced at Cooper before answering, seemingly going through the same thought process that Jonas had. ‘Oh, no, I don’t think that should be a problem,’ he said, and then laughed, a high-pitched, nervous sound that Jonas found intensely grating. He laughed politely along with him. Cooper smiled and took another sip of his drink. It looked as though he had no objections.

&n
bsp; ‘I believe I will buy your servitors, and your hab system core, Mr Reinhardt,’ Glass said. ‘I will have my engineers inspect the system before agreeing to a final price, but provisionally—’

  There was a brilliant flash of light from outside the canopy, for a moment, outshining the sun and casting jagged purple shadows from the mock ruins of the arena. Then they were plunged into darkness, all the lights dead, leaving only the pale sun to highlight the true-borns in silhouette. From somewhere around the ring came the ululating whine of an alarm.

  Glass looked around in panic. ‘What was that?’

  ‘EMP,’ Captain Cooper said. He was composed, barely moving, although there was a note of puzzlement in his voice. ‘That was a big explosion, though. That wasn’t a regular EMP device.’

  Keldra, Jonas thought. Another use for a nuclear bomb was to create an electromagnetic pulse, and it would be a perfect use for the scraps of nuclear material left over from the Dancer. Most electronic warfare used less exotic means, but if you had a ship-board nuke-making plant anyway…

  ‘We’re under attack!’ Glass screamed. ‘Quickly! I have a safe room. Come with me.’

  Some emergency lighting came on, enough for them to follow Glass as he blundered down the steps and through the foliage. As he ran he shouted into a pocket communicator. ‘Colonel Henrick! What is going on?’ Jonas couldn’t hear the colonel’s response.

  They came to one of the follies, a white stone hut picked out by rings of emergency lights. There was a security door delicately hidden in the façade. Glass left a sweaty mark on the palm-reader and then hurried down a set of steps.

  They cycled through an airlock and emerged into a room like a security vault, windowless, the walls visibly reinforced. Glass’s fondness for darkness and highlights was visible here as well: most of the room’s light came from white spotlights shining down from the ceiling onto miscellaneous objects arrayed in wide rows. Some were large enough to stand on their own, but most were tiny, suspended in almost invisible glass frames on the top of black display stands.

  Glass collapsed against the wall as the inner airlock door closed.

  ‘We’ll be safe in here. This segment is self-contained. Escape module. Captain Cooper, you’ve got to help me! Gouveia’s attacking already!’

  Cooper was listening to his own pocket communicator. ‘No hostile ships,’ he said, flipping it shut. ‘The pulse came from a free-floating missile disguised as a piece of debris. We don’t know who fired it.’

  ‘Of course, it’s Gouveia! You said she wouldn’t be able to attack for six weeks!’

  ‘Perhaps I was wrong,’ Cooper said dismissively, as if the thought of his being wrong had never occurred to him before, but now that he had, it wasn’t very interesting. ‘There’s a shuttle on its way to take me back to the Iron Dragon. I’ll review the tactical situation when I’m there.’

  ‘You’ve got to help me,’ Glass said again. He wiped sweat from his bald head and then waved a hand vaguely, indicating the objects on plinths. ‘Anyway, this is my collection,’ he babbled. ‘These are all Planetary Age artefacts. I keep them down here, in the safe room – it’s very important to keep them safe – Planetary Age artefacts.’

  Jonas glanced around at the artefacts. Most were pieces of machinery, damaged or corroded so that their purposes were no longer obvious. There were also fragments of clothing, art objects, papers. There was even a mummified human corpse, wearing a dark blue uniform vaguely reminiscent of Cooper’s, with similar captain’s stripes on the sleeves.

  Jonas wandered over to one of the display stands. The artefact seemed to be a self-contained module: it had power and data sockets that could link it to a larger system, but it looked as though it had its own power supply as well. Part of its surface showed scorch marks, but apart from that it was intact, and it had been polished to so much of a shine that Jonas could almost believe it was new. Astonishingly, it seemed to be active: there was a set of tiny lights set into a groove on its side, one of which was glowing red. There was writing in one of the grooves: EAS-S4 Seagull.

  ‘I do apologize for the inconvenience, Mr Reinhardt,’ Glass babbled, half to himself. ‘I can assure you, this, ah, this does not happen often.’ He let out a nervous titter. ‘Mr Reinhardt?’

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ Jonas tried to say, but no words came. He tried to turn around, but his muscles weren’t responding to him. The Planetary Age artefact remained locked in the centre of his vision. He couldn’t move.

  Chapter Seven

  The Worldbreaker was hours away, but Konrad’s Hope was already coming apart. Most of the starscrapers were dark, and the surface bore scars where solar panels and heat sinks had been stripped away. The end of the docking spindle was a twisted, molten ruin, no doubt damaged during the evacuation riots. The true-borns and their favoured servants would have gone first, followed by any tank-borns who could scare up the cost of an evac ship berth. With the last evac ships gone, maybe fifty thousand tank-borns would be in the city, with nothing to do but wait for the end.

  The space around the city was clear of the normal controlled traffic chaos. The industrial orbitals would have been nudged into orbits towards other cities, and even the smallest tugs and shuttles would be carrying refugees in desperate escape attempts. The only bodies orbiting the city now were smaller rocks and the debris from the shattered spindle.

  ‘Thousand Names, this is the Konrad’s Hope evacuation committee. We’ve gathered the high-priority evacuation cases in one location. Send your shuttle to these coordinates…’

  ‘Thousand Names, my name is Jananna Smith. I’m the only true-born left. I’ve got a lot of wealth tied up in other cities – take me away from here and I’ll see that you’re rewarded—’

  ‘Thousand Names, please, there’s a birthing village full of children still here. They don’t even know what’s happening. For God’s sake, you’ll have room for them, please—’

  The breathless voices sounded in the background of the Thousand Names’s bridge, coming across what had once been the city’s traffic control channels. Everyone with the means to detect them would hope that they were a late-coming evac ship, and everyone with access to a transmitter was bargaining for passage.

  ‘Thousand Names, this is Sister Greyda of the Konrad’s Hope Scriber chapel. We’re delighted you’ve chosen to join us—’

  ‘Brenn, turn that shit off.’ Olzan’s voice came out more strained than he had expected.

  Brenn looked a little startled, but the voices shut off. Vazoya squeezed his hand and muttered something reassuring, but Olzan knew whom she was really trying to reassure.

  Without the chatter, the silence was oppressive. Olzan replaced the live view on the screen with a city map, and began running through the plan again, to take his mind off the approach as much as anything else. ‘The collection is housed in a hangar near the bottom of that starscraper,’ he said, pointing. ‘We’ll take a shuttle in. Docking with a rotating ’scraper will be tricky but Vaz can do it.’

  ‘Of course, I can do it.’ Vazoya’s normal arrogance seemed forced now.

  ‘The power’s out in that ’scraper so it should be empty, but we might get company when folks see the shuttle docking. Most likely the elevators will be down so they won’t reach us too quickly.

  ‘There’s one exhibit in particular that Mr Glass wants. It’s called the Seagull, and it’s the centrepiece of Zhu’s collection. I don’t know what it is, but Mr Glass said we’ll know it when we see it. It’s vacuum-safe, so we can just open the hangar doors and push it out, then the Names can pick it up. We get in and out as quick as we can. I don’t want any encounters with the inhabitants.’ He didn’t want the crew to see them: it would make them real, make it harder to leave them to die. He didn’t want to see them himself, for the same reason.

  ‘Understood,’ said Keldra from the back of the room. Olzan shot her a look. No one had asked her.

  The city spun above Olzan’s head, the shadows of the sta
rscrapers processing like raking fingers across the grey surface. He could feel the gravity change as Vazoya teased the shuttle into a powered orbit that matched the city’s spin. There was a shift in perception, and then he was sitting in a steady one gravity, with the city stationary above him, both of them in the middle of a rotating sphere of stars. Vazoya was gently manoeuvring the shuttle up, towards the hanging mass of Anastasia Zhu’s starscraper.

  Olzan was crammed next to Keldra in the shuttle’s tiny cargo section, both of them dressed in stuffy vacuum suits. If she had such an interest in Planetary Age artefacts, Olzan had decided, then they might as well put that to use. Brenn and Tarraso were still on board the Thousand Names, keeping it in a wide orbit of the city, ready to pick up the artefact and then make a rapid escape once the shuttle was back on board.

  Vazoya moved the shuttle up to the side of the starscraper. Olzan could see the blue-white reflections of their thruster flames in the windows. One wide gap between the windows resolved into the door to the hangar housing Anastasia Zhu’s collection.

  Vazoya stabilized the shuttle next to the small personnel airlock at the edge of the hangar door. A magnetic grapnel line shot across the gap and latched onto the starscraper’s metal wall, and then the shuttle’s hatch swung open. The external airlock wasn’t built to take this type of shuttle, and hovering too close to the wall would be dangerous. They would have to cross the gap in vacuum suits.

  Keldra’s face was pale behind her visor. She hadn’t said much on the shuttle flight, despite her constant talk of the Earth artefact while they were still on the Names. It was vertigo, Olzan realized with amusement. With the rotational pseudogravity in place, they were suspended over an infinite drop filled with shooting stars. Keldra had been a habitat engineer, working in her city’s spine, well away from the outer skin. For someone not used to these manoeuvres the experience could be terrifying.

  Olzan wasn’t in much of a mood to spare Keldra’s feelings. ‘All right, Engineer, get that door open. Your precious artefact’s in there.’ Keldra hesitated. For a moment Olzan thought she wasn’t going to move. ‘Go on. We’ll retrieve you if you fall.’