Belt Three

by John Ayliff

  Looking down, Olzan winced when he saw the damage one of those scraps had done to the Thousand Names. There was an ugly black hole in the forward ring: a whole section of the inner surface had been ripped away, and there were stars visible through a smaller hole in the outer surface. A debris fragment must have hit the outer surface of the ring and punched through, leaving a small entry wound and a larger exit wound as it took all the contents of the ring segment with it, just like Keldra’s bullets had done to the hijackers’ skulls.

  Olzan pulled himself over to the lip of the window where the observation blister hugged the ship’s spine, and felt along the edge of the wall panel until he found a catch. The emergency manual controls folded out of the wall and lit up, a sea of orange and blinking red. These controls were robust, hardwired into the ship’s spine, and with their own power supply, designed to work even when the rest of the ship was dead.

  The lidar display was flickering with traces. Most were dust that wouldn’t penetrate the hull, but the display highlighted a dozen that were large and fast-moving enough to be a threat. The internal status report showed power to both rings was down, although emergency life support was running, and the punctured segment of the first ring had been sealed off cleanly. The main drive was still jammed, and the manual controls couldn’t establish a link with the sail. Manoeuvring thrusters were still online. Olzan shook with relief. Those were all he needed, for now.

  The net activity monitor showed that the signal from Brenn’s implant had flatlined – either Brenn was unconscious or the pilot system was down. In either case, what Olzan had to do was the same. He punched in his seven-character password and threw the switch that cut off the pilot system and engaged the manual controls. The pilot system lights went dead, and a pair of joysticks sprung out into his hands, ridiculously simple, like a child’s game system.

  He braced himself to the panel by his elbows and wrapped his fingers around the control sticks. On the lidar display, several of the large debris pieces were drifting closer. His mouth was dry. He pushed the sticks and felt the rumble of thrusters around him. He accelerated as gently as he dared; Tarraso might be in the middle of treating Brenn, and he didn’t want to lurch while the engineer was in the middle of a delicate operation.

  Olzan steered a path through the remaining fragments. He heard impact sounds as a few smaller pieces hit the spine near him, and some of the larger bodies flashed past the blister, frighteningly close. At last the flickering traces on the lidar display migrated to one side. The inner face of the debris wave had passed them and they were in clear space; any bodies travelling less quickly would have fallen back and become part of the Worldbreaker’s meal.

  Olzan released the joysticks and wiped the sweat from his face. He glanced at the internal status reports one last time: no damage. This time he couldn’t resist checking the cargo bay as well. The Seagull was safe. Everything was going to be all right.

  He pushed the manual controls into their alcove and took the transit module back to the first ring. The gravity was definitely lower than normal; as well as the power being down, the ring must have been knocked out of alignment, so friction was wearing away at its spin. As Olzan ran around the corridor to the bridge he found himself moving in a series of long bounds.

  Brenn was laid out prone in the middle of the bridge. Vazoya sat on the floor next to him, face downcast, holding his hand and rocking gently. Tarraso stood over them, holding the first-aid kit. Keldra sat at one of the control terminals, conscious but not moving, pressing a bandage against her face.

  Tarraso came over to Olzan as he entered the bridge. His face was grim. ‘Are we out of danger?’ he asked.

  ‘We’re out of danger,’ Olzan said. ‘Is Brenn…’

  Tarraso shook his head. ‘It was neural shock, through the implant. There was nothing we could do.’

  There was a sharp pain in the back of Jonas’s neck, at the base of his skull. He clung to the sensation, using it to anchor him in reality against the sea of flashing memories. His limbs froze for a moment and then went limp. He was no longer resisting Cooper. The combat programme had been deactivated, just like the combat programme of Emily’s losing gladiator.

  Wendell Glass was screaming from the other side of the room. ‘Get off him so I can shoot!’ His voice seemed to be coming from the end of an echoing cavern.

  ‘Hold your fire!’ Cooper commanded. He pulled Jonas up by his shoulders and seated him against the base of one of the display plinths. ‘Are you all right? Can you hear me?’

  Jonas blinked, slowly. He ached all over but he didn’t think any bones were broken. ‘I think so.’

  ‘Listen, you’ve got a hacked implant,’ Cooper said earnestly. He was looking at a tiny display on the object he had pressed against Jonas’s neck; it was a programming spike, like the one Jonas had used to override Ayla’s pilot implant. ‘Try to stay calm. I’ve cancelled the muscle override, but it looks like there’s a watcher programme active. I can’t disable the implant or I’ll trigger a wipe.’

  Jonas let himself show panic, but he didn’t say anything; he didn’t want to risk contradicting whatever story he would have to tell.

  ‘Captain Cooper! I order you to get away from that man so that I can shoot!’

  Cooper kept his back to Glass and raised a hand. ‘You will not give me orders.’ His tone was calm and commanding, and he seemed unfazed by the nerve gun pointed waveringly at his back. ‘I am an officer of the Solar Authority and this man is under my protection.’

  Wendell blustered but lowered his gun and handed it back to the security guard.

  ‘Thank you, Captain,’ Jonas said. He got to his feet, moving deliberately slowly. His muscles still ached from the fight but he tried to exaggerate the extent to which he was exhausted. He had to make himself look non-threatening.

  Emily Glass had appeared behind Cooper and was peering over his shoulder at Jonas. She didn’t appear angry like her father, or concerned like Cooper. The spectacle seemed to be a curiosity to her, a diversion from her sensation-overloaded inner life.

  ‘Now, tell me what happened,’ Cooper said. ‘Do you know who put that implant in you?’

  Jonas briefly considered throwing himself at Cooper’s mercy, but discarded the idea. Keldra’s implant would kick in and wipe him in a few hours if he didn’t get back to the Remembrance of Clouds. Even if Cooper could remove it without triggering the wipe, there were too many ways for him to find out that Jonas was not who he claimed to be. No, there was no escape from Keldra at the moment.

  He glanced quickly between the faces in the room. Two security guards with nerve guns, most likely both Soldier-caste tank-borns. If Glass had a stable of servitor gladiators then the guards would most likely have combat enhancement implants. They looked wary of Cooper, but if there was a conflict between him and Glass they would side with their employer.

  Captain Cooper: alert, confident, an ally for now. Wendell Glass: flustered, still out of his depth, but he’d regained some composure and would want to take back the situational authority that Cooper had stolen from him. Emily Glass: memduction addict, barely interested in what was happening around her. Emily Glass, still wearing her memduction helmet and gloves…

  ‘Gouveia,’ Jonas said. ‘I’m working for Gouveia.’ Wendell had used that name earlier; he’d been scared that someone called Gouveia would attack him. Jonas knew of the Gouveias as a powerful Belt Three family, so he could easily believe that one had become a rival city owner. If he guessed right, Cooper was here because Glass was negotiating for the Solar Authority’s support in the conflict, hence all his protestations about purity and keeping the memory of Earth alive. The Solar Authority liked to see themselves as principled, and Glass was trying to convince Cooper that he was the more worthy cause.

  Glass stared at Jonas, for a moment, sunken eyes burning in his round face, then hissed, ‘I knew it.’ Jonas managed not to let his relief show. Glass pointed angrily at Cooper. ‘You said she wouldn’t attac
k so soon.’

  ‘This isn’t an attack,’ Jonas said, before Cooper could respond. He walked over to pick up the fallen artefact and held it up. ‘My employer wanted to acquire this now, rather than risk it being damaged in a future conflict.’

  ‘I didn’t know Gouveia was a collector,’ Wendell said. ‘If she’d asked me, we could have done business.’

  ‘My employer isn’t a collector, publicly.’ Jonas injected just a little disdain into his tone, as if lecturing a slow child. ‘Why buy these things when you can steal them? And if no one knows you have them, you’re not a target.’

  Glass grabbed the guard’s nerve gun again and levelled it at Jonas’s head. Cooper held out an arm to stop him, but Glass didn’t lower the gun. Glass’s voice trembled with forced confidence. ‘Well, you failed. Why shouldn’t I kill you now?’

  Jonas could hear the hum of the nerve gun. He managed not to blink. ‘If you kill me, you kill any chance of a deal with my employer.’ He lifted the artefact. ‘Let me go with this, in an escape capsule. Gouveia’s ship will pick me up. No one needs to get hurt.’

  ‘Cooper! You can’t let him steal from me!’

  Cooper had taken a step back. ‘The Solar Authority has not yet decided which side to take in your conflict with Gouveia,’ he said. ‘We also do not much care who owns which Planetary Age artefact, although we prefer not to see them damaged. I will attempt to prevent true-born bloodshed, but I won’t enter a conflict if there is a non-violent resolution available.’

  ‘But this is extortion!’

  ‘Better that than war.’

  Glass began to lower the gun, then took another step forward and raised it again. His face was bright red. ‘How do I know any of this is true?’ He waved the gun in the direction of the artefact. ‘What’s so special about that, anyway? It’s not even the most valuable thing I’ve got.’

  ‘My employer is specifically interested in this artefact,’ Jonas said. ‘If you’d like to offer something more valuable in its place, though, perhaps I could set up a discussion.’

  ‘No! Tell me what’s so special about that.’

  ‘It’s part of a set.’ Jonas glanced at Emily, just long enough to catch her attention. ‘My employer is assembling the pieces of the Seagull.’

  Emily looked as if she’d been hit by a nerve gun shock. Suddenly her eyes were fixed on his.

  Wendell laughed, hollowly, as if trying to convince himself he saw a joke that Jonas didn’t. ‘There’s no point,’ he said. ‘I tried to assemble the Seagull years ago, but there’s no point now. The fuselage is gone. It was part of Ana Zhu’s collection, but it was on Konrad’s Hope when the Worldbreaker hit.’

  Emily half-turned away, as if she didn’t like to think about the subject but couldn’t help listening.

  ‘Was it?’ Jonas asked. ‘My sources say that one of your ships went in after the Red Line. Why buy these things when you can steal them?’

  ‘It wasn’t…’ Wendell looked desperately at Cooper. ‘It wasn’t stealing. The fuselage would have been destroyed anyway. I was rescuing it.’

  ‘Then you’re to be commended,’ Cooper said, uninterestedly.

  ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter,’ Wendell said. ‘They weren’t fast enough. They didn’t…’ Emily caught his gaze, glaring. ‘Something must have gone wrong,’ he said. ‘We don’t know what happened. They didn’t make it out.’

  ‘They did,’ Jonas said, raising his voice as he drove the point home. ‘They didn’t make it back to you. One of the crew was Gouveia’s agent.’

  ‘Olzan,’ Wendell said darkly.

  ‘No!’ It was the first time Emily had spoken since Jonas arrived. Most of her face was blank but her eyes were blazing, as if emotion was just beginning to force its way up from some deeply buried cavern.

  ‘I don’t know who it was,’ Jonas said. Let them speculate. ‘Your ship made it out, with the Seagull fuselage. Both are in my employer’s possession.’

  ‘The crew,’ Emily demanded. ‘What about them?’

  ‘They’re alive, as far as I know.’ It wasn’t quite a lie. There were ways that the implant could have been removed from Olzan without killing him.

  ‘You can’t prove any of this,’ Wendell said. ‘It’s common knowledge the Seagull fuselage was destroyed at Konrad’s Hope. You and Gouveia could have found out I had a ship there.’

  Jonas bowed his head and tapped the back of his neck. ‘I’ve got memories in this implant that prove it. Memories from the Thousand Names’s Captain Olzan. One of you could view them.’ He glanced at Emily, for a moment, before settling his gaze on Captain Cooper.

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

  ‘Let me,’ Emily said. She had slipped one memduction glove back on, and was already moving closer to Jonas, darting into her father’s line of fire. ‘I’ve already got the helmet. I can do it.’

  Wendell stepped back and lowered the gun. He was hopping from foot to foot in agitation but it looked as though he couldn’t see a way out. ‘Do whatever you like,’ he said.

  Emily put a trembling, gloved hand to Jonas’s forehead. He held the artefact with one hand, raised the other, and clicked his fingers three times. Olzan’s virtual office appeared around him, ghosting through Emily’s body. He flicked to the messages icon and pulled up the last message from Emily to Olzan. He flicked it into her memduction glove.

  Her eyes flickered from side to side as the memory sped into her brain, adding a subjective minute of memory in the space of a few real seconds. When she withdrew her hand tears had appeared in her eyes. ‘Olzan…’

  Cooper frowned. ‘Who is this Olzan?’

  ‘Just a tank-born,’ Wendell said quickly. ‘Administrator-caste. He was captain of the ship that I sent to recover the fuselage.’

  Cooper was looking at Emily. She had wiped away the first tears, but another was coming.

  ‘What does he mean to you?’ he asked, suspiciously.

  ‘Nothing,’ Wendell snapped.

  ‘Perhaps you should see it for yourself, Captain,’ Jonas said. ‘We can extract the sense data and put it on a screen.’

  ‘No,’ Wendell said. He glanced between Cooper, Emily, and Jonas, then slouched, defeated. ‘Take your damn transponder. Tell Gouveia I’ll negotiate.’ He pulled out his communicator. ‘Colonel Henrick, stand down alarm. An escape capsule will be launched from the Haze in a moment. Do not intercept it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Jonas said. He hefted the artefact – the transponder – under his arm, and walked to the escape capsule door. It opened at a touch, revealing a small room with floor hatches, not unlike the shuttle bay where he had first failed to escape the Remembrance of Clouds.

  He stopped in the doorway for a moment and turned back. Emily looked at him, red eyes peering out from between strands of black hair. He thought he could see himself in her: both mourning a lover from across the true-born-tank-born divide, now unable to even talk about their loss. He wished there was a way he could give her the implant, or play all of its memories to her, but there was no time. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  Chapter Nine

  The interior walls of the escape capsule were cushioned like a jewellery box, and humming with life support systems. There were no windows, but there was a tiny screen displaying an external view, along with reassuring status indicators. Jonas watched the Haze of the Ecliptic shrink into the distance. Its navigation lights were active, and the segments of its translucent inner ring surface were lighting up one by one as power was restored after the EMP. The ringship shrank to a point and almost became lost in the glare of the sun. Then the escape capsule moved into the shadow of Santesteban and the ecliptic itself became visible, the millions of rocks of the other belts blurring together into a glittering band around the sky, thickest near the occluded sun where Belts Two and One added to the throng.

  Jonas couldn’t see the Remembrance of Clouds on Santesteban’s docking pylons, but he found it on the capsule’s lidar and then centred t
he screen on it. Little spurts of white flame erupted from crowns of manoeuvring thrusters positioned along the ship’s spine as it moved into position to catch the tiny capsule. The near side of the ship was in sunlight, and the battered Earth mural seemed to shine as it loomed closer.

  There was no communication from the Remembrance, even though Keldra could easily have used the communications laser to talk to Jonas without being intercepted. She didn’t know what had taken place on the Haze; it looked as though she still expected him to be under the control of her implant.

  The Earth mural slid aside as the cargo bay door opened, and the escape capsule floated into Keldra’s domain. A trio of servitors in mismatched vacuum suits caught the capsule and gently manoeuvred it to the cargo airlock, where the spine entered at the forward end of the cylindrical cargo bay. The luxury ringship’s escape capsule didn’t fit with the old freighter’s airlock, but the servitors erected a temporary seal between them and the doors opened, letting the Remembrance’s rust-and-oil smell mix with the clean air of the capsule.

  Keldra was in the airlock, wearing a vacuum suit, but with the helmet clipped to her side. Another pair of servitors floated behind her.

  Jonas propelled himself out of the capsule before she had a chance to speak.

  ‘Keldra, you idiot!’

  She shrank back from the door, startled. It looked as if she had expected him to still be under the implant’s control.

  He grabbed a handhold to stop himself right in front of her. ‘Was that the extent of your plan? Make me grab the transponder and run for an escape pod? Didn’t you think about what could go wrong?’

  Keldra’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. Her startled expression had smoothed out her face, making her look oddly younger. She tried to look past Jonas into the capsule but he moved to block her view.

  ‘Did you get it?’ Almost as an afterthought, her hand went to the nerve gun at her hip. ‘If you didn’t get it I’ve got no use for you.’

  ‘Yes, I got your damned transponder. It’s in the capsule.’ One of the servitors moved past Jonas to retrieve the artefact.