Belt Three

by John Ayliff

The calm voice continued to speak in his ear. ‘You have two minutes to transmit the code…’

  ‘Aurelian, this is the Remembrance of Clouds,’ he said over the transponder signal. There was a catch in his voice, a sense of awe at talking to a piece of living history, but he didn’t have time to think about that now. ‘The Seagull is on board; I’m transmitting the transponder code now. Both ships are friendly. Stand down your weapons systems.’

  The Aurelian’s voice went on for a few more words and then stopped. There was silence on the channel for several seconds. Jonas clung to a handhold, feeling his heart pound. He couldn’t judge when the countdown would have reached zero. The ultimatum might have been cancelled, or the missiles might be en route.

  The Aurelian’s computer voice came quietly over the channel. ‘Captain, is that you? You’ve been so long.’

  Jonas hesitated. This wasn’t the automated system he had expected. If the ship wanted its captain, then he had better provide the captain, if he was to be sure of shutting down the missiles. ‘Yes, Aurelian, this is me. I know I’ve been a long time, but I’m back now.’

  ‘Captain, you sound different.’

  ‘I know,’ said Jonas. The emotionlessness of the computer voice made it sound innocent; he felt as if he was speaking to a child. ‘I’ve…I’ve been gone a long time and things have changed. Have you stood down your weapons systems?’

  ‘Yes, Captain. Weapons systems disarmed.’

  ‘Thank you, Aurelian,’ Jonas said. ‘Remembrance of Clouds out.’ His hand hovered over the control that would end the message. Before he pressed it, he added, ‘I’ll talk to you later, all right?’

  He climbed back to the transit module and began travelling back up the spine. As the module flashed out of the cargo bay and into the narrow spine between the rings, his suit received a call from the ship’s communications system. ‘Thousand Names, this is Iron Dragon shuttle four. I’m coming in to dock now.’

  ‘Shuttle four, this is the Remembrance of Clouds,’ Jonas said. ‘Once you’ve docked, put Keldra in the airlock and then depart immediately.’

  ‘Remembrance, the prisoner wants to talk to you.’

  ‘I’ll bet she does, shuttle four. Put her in the airlock and then depart, please.’

  He stopped the transit module in the ship’s nose complex and went to the observation blister in time to watch the shuttle settling into the docking clamps. The dark cylinder of the Iron Dragon was visible in the distance, along with the flare of shuttle five curving towards it.

  ‘Remembrance of Clouds, this is shuttle four. Do you have a technical problem? The inner airlock door won’t open.’

  ‘I’m aware of that, shuttle four,’ Jonas said. ‘There’s no problem. Put Keldra in the airlock, make sure the outer door has sealed, and then depart, please.’

  There was a distant rumble as the outer airlock door opened and closed. ‘Acknowledged, Remembrance of Clouds. She’s in the airlock.’

  He explored the manual controls until he found the internal camera feeds, and then flicked through them until he saw Keldra in the airlock. She was hanging from the inner door, hammering on the controls, but the emergency seal he had put in place couldn’t be overridden from the outside. He would let her stew for a bit. He had someone else he wanted to talk to.

  He turned back to the communications controls and aimed the comms laser at the Iron Dragon. ‘Iron Dragon, this is Jonas on board the Remembrance of Clouds. Put the captain on, please.’

  Cooper was there almost immediately. ‘Thousand Names, this is Captain Cooper.’

  Jonas stared at the distant Iron Dragon. ‘Use the correct name for my ship,’ he said.

  There was a moment of silence, then Cooper said sourly, ‘Remembrance of Clouds, this is Captain Cooper on the Iron Dragon. We’re no longer receiving the ultimatum transmission from the Earth ship. I take it that means you’ve upheld your side of the agreement.’

  ‘I’ve expanded the transponder’s protection to cover your ship,’ Jonas said. ‘I can withdraw that protection at any moment.’ Actually, he wasn’t sure how quickly, or even if he could, convince the Aurelian’s strange computer to fire on the Iron Dragon, but Cooper didn’t need to know that.

  ‘I’d remind you that there are 200 souls on board my ship, Jonas, most of them tank-borns, like yourself.’

  ‘I don’t want to kill anyone, Captain. I just want you out of here.’

  Cooper’s tone was formal, as if shaking hands to conclude a game. ‘Very well. You have won. I give you my word as a pure-blooded true-born and as a Solar Authority officer that I will not pursue you further.’

  ‘I don’t want your word,’ Jonas spat. ‘I want you to vent your fuel.’

  ‘What?’ Cooper sounded taken aback.

  ‘Leave yourself enough to get on a course back to Belt Three, and dump the rest into space. I don’t trust your word, Captain. I don’t want you to be able to follow us.’

  Cooper disappeared from the channel for a moment. Dead ahead, Jonas saw glittering clouds expand from the sides of the Solar Authority cruiser.

  ‘It’s being done,’ Cooper said.

  ‘Good. Just one more thing.’

  ‘What?’

  Jonas licked his lips. He pulled himself forward on the handrail, staring across space at the Iron Dragon, where Cooper and the memory probe would be. ‘Gabriel Reinhardt was a good man,’ he said. There was a tremor in his voice, but he kept it under control. ‘I wasn’t misleading the memory probe. Everything I said about him in the interrogation was true. I didn’t drive him to suicide: you did, your true-born society and its expectations. That’s why I don’t consider your word as a pure-blood true-born to be worth anything. He was a good man, and you killed him.’

  ‘Are you finished?’

  ‘Yes. Now go.’

  In the distance, tiny thrusters fired. Ponderously, the Iron Dragon began to turn.

  Jonas flipped back to the security camera showing Keldra in the airlock. She had stopped banging on the door and was floating at the side of the chamber, legs curled up and face hidden. It looked as though she was withdrawing in on herself, as she had in the Iron Dragon’s cell.

  Jonas patched his suit in to the airlock intercom. ‘Keldra, it’s Jonas,’ he said softly.

  She sprang to life, banging on the door again. ‘Fuck you, Jonas! You tried to sell me out!’

  ‘Shut up, Keldra. You killed my friends, kidnapped me, and put a mind-control implant in my head. All I tried to do was escape. Why shouldn’t I sell you out?’

  ‘So, you’re going to make a speech and then space me? Spare me the fucking speech.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m going to re-enable your pilot implant, and then I’m going to let you back in.’

  Keldra tried the door again, but it still didn’t respond. She slammed her fist into the bulkhead. ‘Okay, you’ve won,’ she said. ‘Give me control and I’ll take you back to Belt Three. I’ll drop you off at any city you like. I know ones where you can hide from the Authority.’ She tried the door again; still nothing. ‘I’ll give you back what’s left of your cargo and I’ll pay for the stuff I already sold.’

  ‘Can you bring Ayla back, or Matton, or any of the others?’ Jonas asked coldly.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Those are the names of some of the people you killed.’ Jonas breathed, forced himself to calm down.

  ‘I can’t bring anyone back,’ Keldra said. ‘I’m sorry I killed your friends.’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  She shrugged. ‘Okay, I’m not. Let me in and I’ll take you back to Belt Three. You never have to see me again. You have my word.’

  He hesitated. He thought he could believe in Keldra’s word: he knew her well enough to be able to tell if she was lying, and this wasn’t one of those times. Her offer had been what he’d wanted ever since she had captured him, and a few days ago she would have taken it, but now…

  ‘No,’ he said.

 
‘No?’ She sounded incredulous.

  ‘I don’t want to go back to Belt Three. I’m staying on the Remembrance of Clouds.’

  ‘You’re stealing my ship?’

  ‘No, I’m not stealing it. I can’t fly it without you. I’m joining you. We both need each other, Keldra.’

  ‘I don’t need you.’

  ‘Yes, you do. I’ve saved your ass a couple of times now, so we both know I have skills you can use. Plus, like I said, you need someone to talk to, to be an audience when you strike back against the Worldbreakers. Don’t try to deny it.’

  Keldra looked around the airlock, everywhere but at the camera, her free hand moving jerkily in frustration. After a few moments she said, ‘Okay. I need you.’

  ‘All right. I’ll let you in, but there are going to be some changes between us.’

  She laughed hollowly. ‘You want a bigger cut?’

  ‘I’m not joking, Keldra.’

  ‘What do you want, then?’

  ‘For a start, I want you to take this implant out of my head. No more mind control.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll do that. What else?’

  ‘No more killing. If we need money we find other ways.’

  She let out another little hollow laugh, although he wasn’t sure what she found funny. ‘All right. No more killing.’

  ‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘We’re equal partners now. You understand?’

  She snorted. ‘You think you’re my equal?’

  ‘Yes. And I think you’re mine.’

  She turned away momentarily. When she turned back her voice was softer. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘I offered to let you go. Why stay?’

  ‘Because it’s not enough to run and hide and survive anymore,’ he said. ‘Survival isn’t all there is. I once promised someone that I would achieve something great, and I still need to do that, so if there’s some way to strike back against the Worldbreakers, then I want to be a part of it.’

  In the grainy image, Jonas could just see Keldra’s cruel smile reappearing, and he found himself smiling along with it.

  ‘That sounds good to me, Jonas,’ she said.

  ‘Partners?’

  ‘Partners.’

  He disengaged the pilot lockout and allowed Keldra’s implant to resume control of the ship. A shiver ran through her, a sharp intake of breath; she closed her eyes and spread her body out in the microgravity. A smile of pure pleasure came across her face, like someone who had been labouring in too high a gravity returning to her native weight. Around him, the ambient sounds of the ship changed, subtle disharmonies that had built up in her absence resolving themselves. Lights on the emergency control panel turned from orange to green. On his screen, the inner airlock door opened, and Keldra floated back into her ship.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Removing the implant was a simple process, once Keldra had disabled her security measures. Jonas felt uneasy sitting in the medbay’s cramped operation cubicle, but he managed not to let it show. He couldn’t shake the second-hand memory of her writhing in those straps as the pilot implant forced itself into her consciousness for the first time. She didn’t seem to have any emotional response to the cubicle as she supervised the procedure from the main medbay chamber. She must have used it a few times in her career as a pirate, and repressed any trauma associated with it.

  Jonas was under anaesthetic for the procedure itself. When he regained consciousness, Keldra was gone. He felt exhausted: the implant would have used his body’s own energy to fuel its self-extraction procedure, hundreds of nanofilaments slowly and carefully withdrawing from his brain. It had felt much like this when he’d had his first admin implant removed in order to impersonate Gabriel. He felt the same sense of emptiness that he had then, his brain still adjusting to the implant’s absence. He clicked his fingers three times, but the virtual desktop did not appear.

  The implant lay in a kidney dish on the table beside his chair. A rounded cylinder a couple of centimetres long, silver where its surface was visible beneath a coating of blood and spinal fluid. The secret story of Keldra and the Thousand Names was contained in that cylinder, as well as last memories of Olzan’s relationship with Emily Glass.

  Jonas lay back and dozed, waiting for his body to recover. Eventually, he was interrupted by the intercom buzzer. Keldra’s voice crackled out of a speaker by his side. ‘Jonas. Get to the bridge.’

  He reached for the intercom panel. ‘The implant’s out. You can’t order me around anymore.’

  She made a smirking noise. ‘Our agreement didn’t say I had to be polite. Get the fuck in here. I’ve got it on screen.’

  ‘On my way.’

  He got up to leave, but stopped in the doorway and looked back at the implant. Keldra hadn’t said what she wanted done with it once it was out, and she had let the medical robot leave it in the kidney dish. He went back and pocketed it before leaving the medbay.

  A wall of bronze light greeted Jonas as he entered the bridge: an image of the sun, magnified to fill the bridge screen and filtered down to a bearable colour. The room’s other lights were dimmed, so Keldra’s face and the angles of her nest were picked out in red-gold. The floor was a mess where she had ripped out Lieutenant Sands’s temporary control terminals but not bothered to put the floor panels back on. She was staring forward, smiling faintly.

  ‘We’re starward of it,’ she said, not taking her eyes off the screen. ‘You can see it in the sun.’

  Jonas sat at his console and squinted at the image. He could make out the Aurelian as a silhouette near the centre of the sun’s disc. It was a cylinder like the Iron Dragon, but tapering towards one end. It turned end over end very slowly, drifting without control on its long orbit across the belts. It wasn’t much to look at from this distance, but Jonas did feel a certain sense of awe at the thought that it was 300 years old, built when the Earth still existed, and no one but he and Keldra had come close enough to set eyes on it for all of that time. From the look on her face, she seemed to be feeling the same awe tenfold. The relentlessly atheist Keldra would never think of it in those terms, Jonas reflected, but this must be close to a religious experience for her.

  He checked the sensor read-outs on his terminal. The Aurelian was intact as far as the Remembrance’s lidar could detect. There was the radiation trace of a fusion reactor, and a lot of its surface seemed to function as a solar panel. Still powered, after all this time. The computer voice was silent; the ship was transmitting nothing except for its transponder signal, too archaic to mean anything to the Remembrance’s computer.

  The Aurelian grew larger on the screen over the course of several minutes, but stayed in silhouette. It wasn’t until their final approach that the Remembrance swung around to the Earth ship’s sunward side and Jonas and Keldra could see it clearly. It was coated in a layer of belt dust and pocked with 300 years of micrometeorite craters, but beneath that it was silver, touched with gold where its mirrored surface caught the image of the sun. As the Remembrance passed around its rear, Jonas found himself looking into the nozzles of an ancient reaction drive. Parts of the hull were rotating, the dust marks visibly moving past one another. On the darker non-rotating bands Jonas could see clusters of equipment: he spotted sensor arrays, a comms laser, and what could have been launch tubes for the missiles with which the ship had threatened the Iron Dragon.

  ‘It had a sail, see?’ Keldra said, voice hushed. She pointed to one of the non-rotating bands near the middle of the ship that was studded with buds like the sail bud on the nose of the Remembrance. ‘A ring of sail segments, like petals. The whole thing would have looked like a flower. It’ll be decayed now, of course, and they burned out the reaction drive trying to make it back to Earth…’

  ‘So we won’t be going anywhere in it,’ Jonas said.

  ‘I never thought I could get the ship flying again. All I want is the Worldbreaker tech that’s on board.’ From the tone of her voice, he wasn’t sure she quite meant it. She stared at the Aurelian for another
minute before she could tear herself away. ‘You said you could talk to the Aurelian’s computer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It wouldn’t talk to me. Told me it wanted its captain.’

  ‘It thinks that’s me.’

  ‘Lying bastard, like always.’ There was a hint of approval in Keldra’s voice. ‘The captain’s name was Regina Marszalek. You sound nothing like her.’

  ‘I think it assumes I’m her because I had the transponder.’

  ‘Call it up. Tell it we’re coming.’

  The comms laser was still fixed on the Aurelian, relaying the transponder signal. Jonas transmitted over the top. ‘Aurelian, this is Remembrance of Clouds. We’re about to launch the Seagull and come aboard. Will you allow us to dock?’

  The archaic accent of the Aurelian’s computer rang out at once. ‘Of course, Captain.’

  Keldra grinned. ‘Let’s go.’

  Keldra sent servitors in mismatched, brightly coloured vacuum suits swarming through the cargo bay. A dozen of them were rearranging the cargo containers, pushing them to the side of the bay opposite the door, dismantling the protective bubble that she had set up around the Seagull, and clearing a path for it to launch. A smaller group was tinkering with the Seagull itself, detaching the umbilicals that plugged it into the Remembrance. They performed last-minute checks on original systems that hadn’t been used for three centuries, and the hacked-together replacements she had installed years ago, and not tested since.

  The spaceplane’s cabin had pilot and co-pilot seats. Keldra took the pilot seat and Jonas the co-pilot, the straps fitting awkwardly over their bulky yellow vacuum suits. The interior was plain white, with a few stains of dust that Keldra and her servitors had smeared on the walls during their modifications. The controls were all new, Jonas noticed, mostly made up of the spare panels that Keldra had removed from the Remembrance’s bridge. Some of them were very new: it looked as though she had modified a one-person control scheme to allow a co-pilot while he had been recovering from surgery. The controls were held onto the bare dashboard with bolts, and he couldn’t see where the Seagull’s original controls had been. Cables snaked away into the recesses of the spaceplane’s nose to interface with its original systems and with the systems she had installed.