Belt Three

by John Ayliff

  ‘What happened to it?’

  Keldra’s eyes sparkled wickedly as she changed the view to a belt chart. A blue dot pulsed forlornly in inter-belt space. ‘It’s still out there. I worked out where it would be based on the Seagull’s logs and the orbit the Seagull was discovered on. The Aurelian is in an elliptical orbit between Belts Two and Three. I’ve bounced lidar beams off it; I know it’s still there.’

  ‘No one’s looted it?’ he asked.

  ‘People have tried. It must be a collector’s wet dream. But its defence systems are still active. Any ship that gets too close…pssshk!’ She mimed an explosion with her hands.

  ‘And it’ll let the Seagull get close?’

  ‘It should do, now that it’s got the transponder.’

  ‘It should do? You’re not sure?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure.’

  ‘And then, what will you do? You could loot it and sell the artefacts to finance your crusade, but somehow, I don’t think that’s what you’re after.’

  ‘That’s right, I’m not. I’m after a weapon.’

  ‘A weapon against the Worldbreakers?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What is it? Not more nukes?’

  ‘Better than nukes.’

  Despite himself, Jonas felt something stir in his chest. The idea of a weapon that could strike against the Worldbreakers was exciting. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. The Seagull’s logs refer to something, but they’re incomplete.’

  He slumped back into his chair. ‘What do you know?’

  Keldra paused, gathering her breath. ‘This was in the last years of the Worldbreaker war. The Aurelian intercepted a Worldbreaker that had been damaged during the Battle for Mars. They were trying to study its beam projector, to reverse-engineer something they could use against the Worldbreakers.’

  ‘If they succeeded, why didn’t they use it?’

  ‘They were too late,’ Keldra paced across the floor, boots ringing on the metal, and there was a tremor in her voice. ‘Earth went just a few months after Mars. They created their weapon, but they were out in inter-belt space – inter-planetary space, then – and they couldn’t get back in time. They were so close. They were days away.’

  He stared at her. ‘You really think you can defeat the Worldbreakers?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’ll find out when we get to the Aurelian. We’re on our way now.’

  ‘You can’t beat the Worldbreakers, Keldra.’ He tried to keep any hint of excitement out of his voice. He couldn’t let himself be carried away by her fantasy; he had to be the sensible one. ‘Even if you find this weapon, it’s still too late. Earth’s gone. You’re running around the belts chasing after a false hope. You’re insane.’

  ‘Not now I’ve got you. That’s what you said, isn’t it? You keep me sane.’

  ‘Why me, Keldra?’ When he had goaded her in the transit module, he had thought she just wanted anyone to be her audience, but after the most recent memory, he wasn’t sure. ‘Why didn’t you slave-spike me when you learned I was a tank-born?’

  ‘Like you said, you’ve got skills I can use.’

  ‘So do any number of people you could have hired on Santesteban. But you didn’t even go ashore there, did you? I don’t think you’ve had anyone else on this ship for years. What is it about me that makes you want me around?’

  She looked as if she was about to shout at him to shut up, but her desire to explain herself won out. ‘You’re like me.’

  ‘I’m nothing like you.’

  ‘Sure you are. You were a tank-born but you ended up living as a true-born. You didn’t like the world you were born into, so you fought back.’ She fixed him with an intense gaze, and there was an earnestness in her voice he hadn’t heard before. ‘I learned about Earth from history books that no one else could be bothered to read. I hated the Worldbreakers for taking it from us, so I’m fighting back. We both get what we want, and we don’t let anyone hold us back.’ Her intense gaze broke, and she smiled, as if remembering to be cruel and mocking again. ‘Now, you’ll help me or you’ll see what happens to those who try to stop me.’

  Olzan peered through the window to the medbay’s operation cubicle. He, Tarraso, and Vazoya were gathered in the medbay’s cluttered main chamber, perching on beds or counters. In the corner, the asymmetrical arms of the battered old general-purpose medical robot hung dormant from the ceiling. On the other side of the window, Keldra lay on the operation cubicle’s table, held down by straps, amid a clutter of spider-like robot surgery arms. The table was tilted up, allowing Olzan to look her in the eye, but at the moment, she was unconscious, her head slumped at an awkward angle, a line of drool glistening at the side of her mouth. They hadn’t replaced the gel-plast, and a web of red wounds stood out on the side of her face.

  ‘How is she?’ he asked Tarraso.

  The engineer looked up from the medbay’s control console. ‘She’s stable,’ he replied. ‘Beyond that I can’t say.’

  ‘Did the implant take?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell.’

  ‘Wake her up.’

  ‘She needs rest, Olzan.’

  ‘Wake her up now. We need to know if the implant took.’

  Tarraso tapped a control. One of the robot arms in the operation cubicle moved in and injected something into Keldra’s neck. After a few moments she twitched, and her head began to roll slowly from side to side.

  ‘Keldra,’ Olzan said. ‘Can you hear me?’

  She let out a moan, relayed over the medbay speakers. She stirred, then began to struggle, writhing against the straps. Her struggles became more violent and her eyes bulged open, but she didn’t seem to be looking at Olzan, or at anything that was in the room with her.

  Vazoya leaned against the glass and smiled. ‘The implant took.’

  Olzan could only imagine what Keldra was going through. Her brain was suddenly processing a hundred times more sensory information than it was used to. Everything happening to every one of the ship’s systems was just as real to her as the world she perceived through her normal senses, and some of those systems were damaged, so they’d be pushing into her mind damage report signals very much like pain. A shell of new sensations would have appeared around her, and her ordinary body would have shrunk to a speck in the middle of it. Looking at the horror on Keldra’s face, Olzan had a new respect for Brenn and the other uncomplaining pilots he’d met over the years.

  ‘Keldra, listen to me,’ he said, raising his voice to be heard above her screams. ‘We’ve had to plug you into the ship. We can get the implant back out of you as soon as we reach a city. We’ve disconnected the pilot system from as much as we can, so you don’t have to control everything. You should just have the sail and the manoeuvring thrusters. We need you to get control of them and unfurl the sail. Can you do that?’

  Keldra’s screams petered out. Her breath came in frantic pants. She was still looking around in panic, but she had stopped struggling. It looked as if she was over the initial shock and starting to get control of herself.

  ‘Keldra, if you can understand me, nod your head,’ Olzan said.

  She glanced at him with what might have been a look of contempt. It was hard to tell if it was deliberate or just part of her random head movements.

  Vazoya stepped forward and rapped the object she was holding against the glass. It was a small metal box with a dial, connected to a wall data socket by a snaking cable. ‘All right, bitch. You’re not totally brain-dead. I know there’s something in there that can understand me.’ She twisted the dial, and Keldra convulsed. Her scream this time was short and had a different timbre, a cry of physical pain. ‘This is one of the ship’s damage sensors,’ Vazoya said. ‘I’ve rigged it up to send a damage signal through the implant, bypassing the normal safeguards. What you just experienced was about a hundredth of the shock that killed Brenn. This is what you get if you don’t do what we say.’ She twisted the dial again. Keldra twitched, but this t
ime she didn’t cry out. ‘Now, get control of the ship and get the fucking sail open.’

  ‘I’m getting a signal from the sail,’ Tarraso said. ‘It’s not unfurling yet, but it looks like she’s establishing control.’

  ‘Thank you, Keldra,’ Olzan said. She seemed to understand them, but she still hadn’t spoken. If the pilot shock had damaged her, then she might be on the mental level of a child, or even of a smart animal. He tried to keep his voice clear and encouraging. They might have to give her simple instructions and reinforce them with rewards and punishments.

  Keldra had calmed down. She was looking straight ahead, her eyes defocused. She flexed her fingers, and there was a distant rumble, a subtle change in the ambient sounds of the ship. It felt like some of the manoeuvring thrusters were firing. A smile began to curl up her lips.

  ‘Good,’ Olzan said. ‘You’re getting the hang of this. Now, see if you can unfurl the sail. Take your time.’

  ‘As long as she doesn’t enjoy it too much,’ Vazoya said, fingering the damage box. Olzan glared at her.

  ‘The sail’s still moving,’ Tarraso said. ‘It’s not properly unfurling yet. Looks like she’s testing it. I’m getting a lot of signal through the implant. It’s definitely taken.’

  Olzan sat down on the medbay table. ‘Thank God for that. It looks like we’re going home after all.’

  Once Keldra had got the sail open, they could deal with the trickier task of getting her to align it correctly, to put them on course for Santesteban. The Seagull was still sitting at the back of the cargo bay, Olzan’s ticket to a new life with Emily; a life as a true-born by marriage. He called up his implant’s navigation programme and did a quick course calculation. If Keldra could get the sail fully unfurled, they could be at Santesteban in two weeks.

  ‘Olzan,’ Tarraso said suddenly. ‘Take a look at this.’

  Olzan looked over Tarraso’s shoulder at his engineer’s datapad. Numbers and engineer jargon seemed to swim around one another on the pad too quickly for him to focus on. ‘What’s it mean?’

  ‘Keldra’s through the lock-outs I installed.’

  Olzan blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘She’s in full control of the ship. She has been since she started moving the sail, but I’ve only just noticed.’

  ‘That’s not possible!’ Vazoya shouted. She sprang across the room to look at Tarraso’s pad, stumbling a little. ‘I locked her out of the…of everything, except the sail, and…’

  ‘You must have done the lock-outs wrong,’ Olzan said.

  Tarraso tapped some commands into the datapad, cursing a couple of times. ‘No. Maybe. The lock-outs aren’t working.’

  ‘Bitch!’ Vazoya shouted. She leaned against the window to the surgery room, holding up the damage box. ‘Bitch! Stop that now!’ She twisted the dial. Nothing happened.

  ‘She’s isolated that damage sensor,’ Tarraso said. He looked worried and confused. ‘Olzan, are you…I’m having trouble thinking.’

  A horrible realization knotted in Olzan’s chest. ‘She’s got into the hab system,’ he said. ‘She’s cutting off our oxygen.’

  He pushed himself up against the glass, shoving Vazoya out of the way. Now that he knew what was happening, he noticed that his hands hit the glass a bit too heavily, as if he was drunk. ‘Keldra, don’t do this. We’ll get back to Santesteban and we’ll get the implant out of you, I promise.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want it out.’ Keldra’s voice was a whisper, relayed over the medbay intercom. Dimly, Olzan was aware that her lips weren’t moving as she spoke; the voice was coming from the ship. She was looking at him with a satisfied smirk, a world away from the helpless screams of a few minutes ago. ‘I think I like it. I’m not sure I even need the rest of you.’

  ‘Fuh…Fuck you!’ Vazoya shouted, and then collapsed, panting, to floor.

  Keldra flexed her fingers again. There was another vibration, a subtle change in acceleration. On Tarraso’s pad, through a haze of hypoxia, Olzan could see that the sail was unfurling and the ship was repositioning itself for a course change.

  The medical robots around Keldra’s bed were starting to move. One of them extended a scalpel arm and began to cut away the strap around one of her wrists. Olzan saw it with an odd emotional detachment. It all seemed very far away, as if he was looking at it from the end of a long tunnel.

  ‘This is my ship now,’ Keldra’s voice said decisively.

  Distantly, Olzan could see the medical robot next to him begin moving, its scalpel arm rising up.

  Chapter Ten

  The ship was a dark grey cylinder, barely visible at the end of its blue-white reaction drive flame as it pushed itself deeper into inter-belt space. Magnifying the view and filtering it against the glare, Jonas could make out the dimples of weapon emplacements and shuttle bays on its hull, and the five concentric gold circles of the Solar Authority logo that stood out on its nose like an arrogant bullseye. On the belt chart, the blue line of the ship’s probable course curved sunward through the tangle of rock orbits that made up Belt Three, down into the sparse void between the belts.

  It was mid-morning, ship-time, and Jonas was alone on the bridge. Keldra was asleep, having stayed up late into the night in a stim-fuelled painting frenzy, creating a new cloud mural in one of the corridors. It would be another few hours before the Remembrance’s computer flagged the new ship as being on an intercept course and alerted her. Inside a belt, the similarity of the two courses would be nothing remarkable, but the chance of two ships passing so close in inter-belt space was vanishingly small.

  He pulled up the ship’s transponder details. It was the Iron Dragon: Lance Hussein Cooper’s ship.

  He looked at the read-out and smiled. Wendell Glass must have convinced Cooper of his true-born credentials, and coughed up the money for the Solar Authority’s help against Gouveia. Cooper must be on his way to retrieve the stolen transponder before it got into Gouveia’s hands. Knowing the Solar Authority, Cooper would want to achieve his objective with the minimum of bloodshed, and certainly without risking damage to the Planetary Age artefact. He might just be prepared to make a deal with poor kidnapped true-born Gabriel Reinhardt.

  Jonas pulled Captain Cooper’s Earth-tech business card from his pocket and pressed his thumb against the white circle that activated it. Even out here in inter-belt space, the secure signal icon was there.

  He held his thumb to the card’s ‘transcribe’ marker and whispered his message into the card. ‘Gabriel Reinhardt, Remembrance of Clouds, to Captain Cooper. Please acknowledge.’ The words appeared on the card’s surface in neat capitals. He pressed the ‘send’ marker and then placed the card on the terminal, and waited.

  The round-trip light-speed delay was only a few seconds, but another two minutes passed after that before the card lit up with a response. ‘CAPTAIN COOPER, IRON DRAGON, ACKNOWLEDGING GABRIEL REINHARDT.’

  ‘I am being held unlawfully,’ Jonas whispered. ‘The Remembrance’s captain is unlikely to surrender to you. I can sabotage the Remembrance’s defences and deliver the transponder, if you will help me.’

  The next reply took longer to arrive, close to ten minutes. Jonas pictured Cooper discussing the message with his staff on the Iron Dragon’s bridge. When it appeared, though, it was what Jonas had hoped for.

  ‘I THINK WE CAN DO BUSINESS, MR REINHARDT.’

  Jonas looked at the message for a few moments and then tucked the card back into his pocket. He pressed the intercom buzzer that would summon Keldra to the bridge.

  ‘What is it?’ Her voice was groggy and annoyed. He felt an immature sense of pleasure at having woken her.

  ‘You’d better get to the bridge,’ he said. ‘We’ve got company.’

  Keldra was on the bridge in a couple of minutes. She was still wearing her dishevelled ship overalls, stained with blue and white paint; Jonas wondered whether she’d slept in them or hastily put them on after he’d summoned her. As she stared at the ship on the bridge screen, her
bleary expression gave way to a scowl. ‘Authority,’ she spat.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Jonas said. ‘Do you recognize that ship?’

  Keldra climbed into her control nest. ‘They don’t usually bother me. If a family can afford the Solar Authority, they can afford my ransom first.’

  ‘Looks like Wendell Glass can afford them.’

  ‘Looks like it.’ She fumbled a stim pill out of a packet and gulped it down. ‘Get rid of them.’

  ‘Get rid of them? How?’

  ‘Be a true-born. You’re the captain. We’re a simple trading vessel heading for Belt Two. You’re incensed he’s following us, your family will have his hide, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I was on Santesteban. I’ll be on I don’t know how many security cameras and guard servitors’ memories. If he’s after the transponder, he’ll know my face.’

  ‘All right. I’ll do it.’ Keldra ran her fingers through her hair and adjusted the camera poking over one of her nest’s control boards. There was a polite chime as she began transmitting. ‘This is Captain Keldra Smith of the trading ship Remembrance of Clouds. We weren’t expecting to meet anyone else down here. Is there anything we can do for you?’

  There was another chime as a responding call came through. Keldra put it on the screen. A young man with a neat beret and the stripes of a communications officer appeared. ‘One moment please, Remembrance of Clouds. I’ll fetch Captain Cooper.’

  Smith? Jonas mouthed. Keldra shot him a dirty look.

  The communications officer stepped aside and Cooper appeared on the screen. ‘Captain Lance Hussein Cooper, Solar Authority cruiser Iron Dragon. What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Keldra Smith.’

  Cooper made a clicking noise in his throat. ‘I don’t think so. I’ve been to Smith family gatherings, and you don’t look like any of them. You don’t look like a true-born at all, and you don’t speak like one. Put me through to the real captain, or give me the name of your vessel’s owner.’