Belt Three

by John Ayliff

  ‘I’m owner-captain of the Remembrance of Clouds. We’re a private trading vessel on our way to Belt Two. We picked you up on a similar course and were wondering—’

  Cooper had started speaking over Keldra. ‘You’re not a legitimate trading vessel unless you’ve got a true-born owner. Solar Authority law states that tank-borns can’t own inter-belt ships. Let’s cut to the chase and tell one another why we’re really here. I know that you’re carrying stolen goods. You will furl your sail and allow the Iron Dragon to dock and my men to search your ship.’

  ‘We’re not carrying any stolen goods,’ Keldra said.

  Cooper smiled without even a hint of sincerity. ‘Then you should have no objection to our searching your ship.’

  Jonas caught Keldra’s eye. Agree, he mouthed. She glared at him.

  On the screen, Cooper’s smile deepened. ‘I’m waiting for your answer, “Captain Smith”.’

  Keldra hesitated and then leaned in towards the camera. ‘Your Solar Authority can go to hell.’ She shut off the transmission and stared at the blank screen.

  ‘Smooth,’ Jonas said.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Either we give them the transponder, or they take it. If we hand it over without any trouble there’s a good chance they’ll let us live.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what you’d do, isn’t it? Surrender. Like you surrendered to me.’ She wasn’t looking at him.

  ‘That’s a Solar Authority cruiser.’

  The bridge screen went dark, followed by the room lights, leaving Keldra in a cocoon of dim glow cast by her nest’s control boards. She was curled up in her chair, eyes closed.

  ‘Keldra, what are you doing?’

  ‘Why did it have to be the Solar Authority?’ Keldra’s voice sounded on the verge of tears. ‘I came so close. I came so fucking close.’

  A vibration ran through the floor. The ship was turning.

  ‘Keldra, what are you doing? We can’t run. We’re a sail ship. That’s a Solar Authority cruiser.’

  ‘We’re not going to run.’

  ‘Are you mad? We can’t fight!’

  ‘We can always fight.’

  The room lights came back on. On the screen was a local belt chart, with the course lines of the Remembrance of Clouds and the Iron Dragon curving inexorably closer together. There was another rumble beneath Jonas’s feet, and a sense of activity beyond the bridge. There were tears glinting in Keldra’s eyes, but her face was curling into a determined smile, and in it he could see systems lighting up across the ship, servitors waking up and moving into new routines.

  Looking at her then, Jonas almost regretted that his plan would stop her from fighting the Iron Dragon. He would likely be saving her life as well as his own, but still, there was something in her face at that moment that he was beginning to admire.

  ‘I’ve got the advantage,’ she said.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘They need the transponder. They can’t use the big guns or they’ll risk destroying it. I don’t have to hold back.’

  ‘What are you planning, Keldra?’

  ‘I’m furling the sail. I’m turning us end-on, to present a smaller target. They won’t let us get close enough to use our drive flame as a weapon, so I’m pointing the launcher at them. I used most of the uranium back at Santesteban but I’ve got enough to scrape together a small warhead. Servitors are making it now.’

  ‘One warhead? He’ll shoot it down. This isn’t a dumb Worldbreaker you’re dealing with, Keldra. Solar Authority ships have point defence.’

  ‘Not one warhead. Dozens of missiles. One of them’s the nuke, the others are junk; everything the servitors can strip out of the ship and load into the tube. They might not be able to shoot everything down. The nuke might get through.’

  ‘It’s a long shot.’

  ‘It’s all I have.’

  ‘It’s not all you have. We can surrender. Call him back up.’

  ‘I don’t surrender,’ she spat. ‘Get out of here. Let me think.’

  Jonas sat on the couch in the lounge, set the screen to a local belt chart, and watched as the ships closed with one another. He wasn’t an expert ship-to-ship tactician, but he knew how tense this stage of the encounter was for the ships’ commanders. It was a game of chicken: both commanders wanted the first strike advantage, but the longer they left it before firing, the better their chances would be of hitting with that first strike.

  If Keldra was to stand a chance, she needed that first strike advantage. She wouldn’t leave it too long. That informed the timing of his next move. He was playing chicken as well, although the other players didn’t know it. He wanted to leave it as late as possible, to give Keldra little time to react and recover, but he had to move before she fired on the Iron Dragon.

  He watched the distance tick down. The Remembrance’s course had changed when it had furled the sail, allowing the Iron Dragon to close more quickly: 20,000 kilometres; 15…At 10,000, he got up and walked to the transit hub.

  He took the transit module to the ship’s spine and made his way to the forward observation blister. Space looked empty, the normal scattering of Belt Three asteroids reduced to a tenuous line around the ecliptic. He could just make out the spark of the Iron Dragon’s reaction drive as it decelerated to match courses with the Remembrance of Clouds.

  He felt for the catches that would release the emergency control panel. Keldra would know about the panel, of course – she would know every inch of her own ship, even the parts that didn’t report to her pilot implant – but she shouldn’t know that he knew. Still, it was just possible she had removed the panel, or trapped it, or set up his implant so that this would trigger a wipe…

  His fingers found the catches. The panel unfolded into his hands.

  The local belt chart was empty, apart from the Iron Dragon gradually closing. The net activity monitor was spiking: Keldra was active and alert. The system lights were green with the occasional blinking orange.

  Jonas entered the passcode from Olzan’s memory and then threw the main override switch. The system lights turned orange-red. The net activity monitor flatlined as the ship stopped responding to Keldra’s implant.

  She wouldn’t be able to do anything without the emergency controls. There was just one control he needed now: the lock to the observation blister’s door. He found it quickly enough. Sealed in, with the Iron Dragon on its way to rescue Gabriel Reinhardt, all he had to do was wait.

  It was less than a minute before Jonas heard a rap at the observation blister door. Keldra had her face close to the glass. Her customary scowl couldn’t quite hide a current of wide-eyed shock. He had caught her completely off guard.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she shouted, her voice muffled by the glass.

  ‘I’m saving my life, and maybe yours too,’ Jonas shouted back. ‘We can’t fight the Solar Authority. Give them the transponder and maybe they’ll let us go.’

  ‘I don’t negotiate. I don’t run, and I don’t beg.’

  ‘How the hell did you even last this long? Sometimes you have to make deals.’

  ‘Not with the transponder. Not when I’m so fucking close.’

  ‘You’d really rather die than give it up?’

  She banged on the door. The sound was tiny and dull inside the blister.

  ‘You’re insane, Keldra.’

  She disappeared from the window. Jonas heard the transit module rumble away.

  He studied the emergency controls for a few moments, looking for a way to lock the transit modules down, but he couldn’t read Engineer-caste language well enough. Keldra would be back, but it shouldn’t matter. Outside, the Iron Dragon’s drive flame was a white line stretching a quarter of the way across the sky. It wouldn’t be long now.

  The transit module rumbled again, and there was another bang on the door. In the window was the bright red pistol-like shape of a cutting torch. Behind it, Keldra’s face was just visible through the visor of a vacuum suit helmet.
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  ‘You won’t get through in time,’ Jonas said. Actually, he was bluffing: he had no idea how long it would take her to cut through the door, or how long it would be before the Iron Dragon docked with the Remembrance. He hadn’t expected her to vandalize her own ship in order to get to him.

  A few sparks rushed past the window, and a red welt appeared on the door and began moving. It was a thick metal door, designed to keep the observation blister and its emergency controls safe, even in the case of damage to the spine, but given long enough Keldra’s torch could cut through anything.

  ‘Think about this, Keldra,’ Jonas shouted over the hiss of the torch. She had traced a good fraction of a circle now, the sparks tumbling away in fascinatingly straight lines in microgravity. ‘The captain of that ship thinks I’m Gabriel Reinhardt. He thinks I’m a true-born. If you surrender, he might be lenient, but if he gets here and finds you’ve just murdered a true-born with a cutting torch…’

  She didn’t respond. Outside, Jonas could make out the body of the Iron Dragon at the end of the flame.

  ‘If you listen to me, we can still get out of this.’ The cutting torch had completed a rough half circle. ‘Listen, give him me, as well as the transponder. Tell him I was the one in charge. He thinks I’m a true-born, so he’ll believe that. He’ll let you go, and then I’ll try to talk my way out.’ He didn’t even know if Keldra could hear him.

  A light split off from the Iron Dragon’s drive flame, as tiny as one of the sparks from Keldra’s cutting torch. It curved towards the Remembrance of Clouds.

  ‘They’ve launched a shuttle,’ Jonas said. ‘The game’s up, Keldra.’

  She didn’t respond.

  He watched as the spark grew into a set of flickering manoeuvring thrusters, arrayed around the edge of the fat hemispherical shape of a Solar Authority shuttle. From the observation blister, Jonas could see every detail of the craft as it positioned itself in front of the Remembrance’s main docking airlock and slowly moved in. The circle that Keldra was cutting was a little more than three-quarters complete.

  There was a shudder as the two ships made contact. A warning appeared on the emergency control panel, indicating that someone was trying to open the docking airlock from the outside. Jonas tapped the button that gave it permission, and saw the read-outs indicating that the airlock was cycling.

  The cutting torch shut off. Keldra must have felt the shuttle dock. There was silence for a moment, then a clang as the torch rapped against the window.

  ‘Fuck you, Jonas! You should have fought. We had a chance. We had a decent fucking chance. I had the transponder! I was so fucking close, and you’ve thrown it away.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Keldra,’ he said. ‘A decent chance isn’t good enough for me. I want to survive.’

  ‘You run and you hide and you surrender,’ she spat. ‘You survive. That’s all you ever do.’

  ‘That’s all there is.’

  There was movement at the window. Jonas pulled himself up to the glass to look through. More figures had appeared behind Keldra, floating in single file in the cramped space. They wore dark blue armoured vacuum suits with intimidating face-concealing helmets, and the five concentric circles of the Solar Authority flag in gold on their shoulders. The leader’s voice came through a distorting speaker grille. ‘Keldra 2482-Pandora-33842, Engineer, I am placing you under arrest for the theft of a true-born’s property, illegally commanding an inter-belt vessel, and refusing a Solar Authority search.’

  ‘To hell with you!’ Keldra hurled the cutting torch at the Solar Authority soldier and pulled a slug-thrower pistol from her belt. The soldier batted the torch away with an armoured gauntlet then rushed forward, propelled by the suit’s tiny thrusters. Keldra fired, the muzzle flash momentarily blinding and the shot echoing through the corridor, but the slug went wide, punching a hole through the inner layer of the wall. The soldier had pushed the gun aside and was already in the process of disarming her. Jonas caught Keldra’s resentful face as the soldier spun her around to put her into handcuffs.

  Another pair of Solar Authority soldiers hauled her away. Their leader moved up to the window. She de-opaqued her visor, revealing an angular face with short-cropped blonde hair very similar to Cooper’s. ‘Gabriel Reinhardt?’

  Jonas nodded.

  ‘I’m Lieutenant Sands. Captain Cooper explained your arrangement. If you open the door, I’ll take you back to the Iron Dragon.’

  ‘Thank goodness you’re here, Lieutenant,’ Jonas said as he moved to the door control. ‘That madwoman was going to kill me.’

  The damaged door shuddered aside. Behind it, Lieutenant Sands had a nerve gun in her hand, pointed casually at him.

  He forced a little laugh. ‘Lieutenant, please, there’s no need for—’

  Sands moved into the blister. ‘Jonas 2477-Athens-20219, Administrator, I am placing you under arrest for theft of a true-born’s property, refusing a Solar Authority search, impersonating a true-born, and for the murder of the true-born, Gabriel Reinhardt.’

  Chapter Eleven

  The prison cell’s walls glowed from within, just too bright to be comfortable, leaving no shadows anywhere in the cell. The gravity felt about half a gee, much lighter than the full one gee that Jonas had become used to on the Remembrance of Clouds. There was a bunk built into one wall, and in the corner was a compact bathroom unit. There was no barred window like the one in Keldra’s prison cell, and when the door closed it blended into the wall so that it was hard to tell where it had been. He felt as if he was floating in an empty white void.

  The flight over in the shuttle had been silent. Keldra had been withdrawn, not making eye contact with Jonas or any of the soldiers. He didn’t know where they had taken her. She could be in the next cell, or on the other side of the ship. She could be dead already.

  As they’d departed the Remembrance, Jonas had been able to see another of the Iron Dragon’s shuttles come in to dock, no doubt containing a prize crew of engineers to take charge of Keldra’s ship. By now they would be working their way through the cargo bay, checking each container for booby traps, taking an inventory of their captured goods. He wondered what they’d do with the Seagull once they found it. Probably break it up and sell the pieces. Put them on stands.

  Somehow this hurt more than it had when Keldra had captured him. Then he’d just seen Ayla and his other friends mind-wiped, he’d made an effort to escape and been outsmarted, and he’d had nothing to escape to anyway. He had been resigned to death. Those things hadn’t changed, but now…

  Now he was angry. This was wrong; this wasn’t how it ought to go. He’d been prepared for the possibility that his escape plan would fail, and that he’d die or remain Keldra’s captive, but not for being accused of Gabriel’s murder. For the last six years he’d tried to live up to the name he’d inherited, to live in a way that Gabriel would have been proud of. Not only had he failed, but everything he’d done in those years had been negated. The records would show that Gabriel had died six years ago, and Jonas had killed him. Not negated: stolen from him. Keldra and Cooper had stolen Gabriel’s legacy.

  He suspected that this was how Keldra felt every second of every day. His mind kept going back to the Seagull, and to the image of the Aurelian on the Remembrance’s bridge screen. They had come so close.

  He got up off the bed and paced across the room. There had to be a way out. If they reached the Solar Authority’s headquarters on 37 Fides, or one of the Authority’s outposts in Belt Three, all that awaited him was a show trial and a mind-wipe. If he were to escape then he had to do so while the Iron Dragon was still in inter-belt space. He had got out of Keldra’s cell; he could get out of Cooper’s. He had to force himself to think.

  He guessed that Cooper would want to interrogate him en route. That would be his chance to move. He had the advantage of having met Cooper back on Santesteban and formed an impression of him, and now he tried to recall that impression, to conjure up an image of the man in his mind. Abs
olute self-assurance that hadn’t wavered even when Keldra’s EMP had hit the Haze. An effortless aura of command. Above all, a burning sense of racial superiority that had led him to help Jonas without question when he thought he was a true-born, then chase him down without mercy when he somehow found out that he had lied.

  Jonas didn’t think he could goad Cooper in the way that he had goaded Keldra. If the captain had demons, they would be locked away too securely for him to reach. Unlike most Solar Authority officers, Jonas didn’t think he could be bargained with or bribed. He couldn’t be intimidated; he couldn’t be moved to pity. Maybe, if his sense of superiority could lead him to underestimate Jonas, he could be tricked.

  It was worth a shot.

  There would be at least one camera in the cell, although Jonas couldn’t see where it was. He sat on the bunk and looked at the middle of the wall. He let his posture sag, looking dejected, defeated. He opened his mouth then stopped a few times, as if trying to pluck up the courage to speak.

  ‘Captain Cooper. I know you can hear me,’ he said at last. He let his voice tremble, gave it his best pleading tone: he had to sound as if he was too emotional to have thought this through. ‘I’m not a true-born – I lied to you – but we can still make a deal. Keldra and I, we found an Earth ship. It’ll be full of Planetary Age artefacts. We’ve already disabled its defences, just project our ship’s course forwards and you should find it. Take it, take Keldra, but let me go. Please.’

  He kept staring at his spot on the wall for a few minutes, letting tears form in his eyes. He had to play on Cooper’s sense of racial superiority, let Cooper believe that Jonas was a spineless tank-born, breaking under pressure already.

  There was no response, but he hadn’t expected there to be one. He lay back on the bunk and waited, trying not to think at all.

  Some time later a slot appeared at the base of the door and a tray of food slid into the cell. Low-grade tank-born worker food: a step up from servitor-feed, but not a large one.