Valhalla Station: A Space Opera Noir Technothriller (The SynCorp Saga: Empire Earth Book 1)

by Bruns, David

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s unethical for therapists to counsel friends.” She offered him a playful expression. “So I can’t be a counselor, see?”

  “I see,” he said.

  She cleared her throat. “I was kidding, Kwazi.”

  “I know.”

  Milani looked up at him, her smile returning. “I’m glad you see me that way. As a friend.”

  He nodded, as if agreeing on the existence of a universal constant. They stared into space, appreciating a view so full of stars there seemed more points of light than darkness between.

  “What about your parents?” she asked. “You’ve never spoken of them, either.”

  “My mother was a cultural anthropologist,” Kwazi said. “ She’s the one who named me.”

  “You’re Kenyan, yes?”

  “Yes, on my father’s side,” he answered. His earliest memory of pulling water from a well on Earth resurfaced. Kwazi could hear his mother calling his name. “My mother was English. My father fled Kenya during the Drought Wars. He finally stopped running in Ghana, where my mother was part of a university expedition. He was injured, and she became his nurse. Then I came along, and they got married.”

  His speech accelerated as he spoke. It was the most he’d said outside his informal counseling sessions with Milani since…

  Speaking of his mother made him realize how much he missed her.

  “I’ve read about that time on Earth,” Milani said. “Populations moving in herds from flooded coastlines. Constant conflict. Borders closing.”

  Kwazi said nothing.

  “But we survived,” Milani said. “Thank goodness for the Company.”

  “Yes. Thank goodness for the Company,” he echoed.

  “Have you spoken with her lately?” Milani asked.

  “Who?”

  “Your mother,” she said. “You sound like you miss her. I try to see my parents on Mars at least once a week. But now—I guess I should call them, actually.”

  “I used to talk to her all the time.” His voice sounded distant even to him, like he was thinking about something other than what he was saying. “But … it’s been a while.”

  “I’ll bet Helena the All Powerful could arrange it. Maybe talking with her would—”

  “She died when I was eight,” Kwazi said.

  The silence of the dim lounge swelled around them. Had the Bull moved at all? Kwazi thought his focus star had, but it was so far away and hard to tell.

  “I’m sorry, Kwazi,” Milani said. “I didn’t mean to bring up a painful subject.”

  He nodded an acknowledgment. “I know. My father took it pretty hard. Disconnected from everything. My grandfather raised me until I hopped a shuttle off-planet.” A sudden restlessness came over him. He’d been standing so still for so long. “I think I’ll take a walk.”

  Milani nodded. He saw it reflected in the ship’s window. “I’m sorry if I—”

  “No, it’s not you, Milani,” he said turning to face her. Was that the first time he’d called her by her first name? Placing one hand on her shoulder, Kwazi said, “I enjoyed talking with you. I always enjoy talking with you.”

  Her faint smile returned. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  Kwazi shook his head, but it was a half gesture. He didn’t want her to think he was angry with her.

  “I’m enjoying the alone time,” he said. “I seem to get so little of it now.”

  “I understand,” she said. “Now—when you need it most.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then. See you tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  • • •

  “You’re not allowed in this section.”

  Two armed guards stood in the doorway connecting the mid and aft sections of the Corporatum . Kwazi’s onboard walkabout had taken him toward Engineering, where he hoped being closer to the starship’s engines would help calm him again. A corner near the converters turning fusion power into thrust, maybe, where he could sit down, maybe lean against the ship’s hull. Get a poor man’s massage.

  “Did you hear me?” the guard asked. His partner laid a loose hand on his sidearm.

  “I did,” Kwazi said. He really wanted to sit next to those converters.

  “Hey—you’re the guy,” the first guard said. He elbowed the partner. “You’re the hero.”

  Inside, Kwazi winced. He tried to keep it off his face. He drew up, trying to be what they wanted him to be.

  “I was just one guy,” he said, quoting a line from one of Helena’s interview scripts. Then another. “I was one of the lucky ones.”

  His skin grew hot when he said it. Did he really need the alone time this badly?

  “You’re that guy?” asked the partner. His hand came off the weapon, extended forward. Kwazi took it, an involuntary response. “I heard you were on board, but … wow, my kid’s gonna be psyched. Can I get a snap?”

  Kwazi’s cheek trembled. “Sure.”

  The guard sidled up next to him, put his arm around him. “Snap it, Matt.” The other guard, the one who’d stopped Kwazi, stared straight at them and blinked .

  “Done,” he said, “and sent to you. Now, do me.”

  The guards traded positions. Kwazi felt like a prop in a two-man show. The first guard repeated the process.

  “So psyched,” the one not named Matt said.

  Kwazi offered a pale smile. “Is it okay if I—”

  “Oh, sure, sure,” Matt the guard said, opening the door. “Just don’t touch anything, yeah?”

  “Wait, are you sure we should—”

  “Hey, this guy? He’s the most famous man in the Company, next to Tony Two-point-oh. And he’s a hero.”

  Not-Matt still seemed dubious, but shrugged.

  “Thanks,” Kwazi said, passing between them. He touched the panel on the other side.

  “Thank you ,” Matt said. “It’s men like you who—”

  The door slid shut.

  Kwazi walked. The Pax Corporatum seemed endless, and he started to wonder if he was walking in circles. The movement, at least, was doing him good. The hull droned with the engines, and while it wasn’t magical like earlier, it was something he could focus on.

  ENGINEERING

  MAIN CONVERTERS

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

  Finally. He touched the door controls, half-expecting rejection. The doors separated.

  Maybe he’d get his poor man’s massage after all.

  As soon as the door closed behind him, he saw the feet. They extended beyond a console. Kwazi moved into the control room to find three people, the faction’s corporate logo emblazoned in black upon their blue jumpsuits. Taulke personnel but not ship’s complement. All three—two men and a woman—looked alive but … out of it. They lay on the floor, their bodies slack, their eyes staring. Gravity hung open their mouths.

  They looked drugged.

  “Hey,” Kwazi said, not sure he wanted any of them to answer. The last thing he’d wanted to find was more people to deal with. This was his spot. He’d claimed it already. “Hey .”

  One of the men dragged his gaze to Kwazi. “Don’t,” he said. His nametag read Abrams . “It’s just ending for me. We’re taking it in shifts.” Something about that was funny to him because he laughed.

  “You guys need to go,” Kwazi said. He was tired of being patient. He had only a few hours left before he became Helena’s puppet again. “I need some alone time.”

  “No, you need to join us,” Abrams said. “We’re all having alone time.”

  Kwazi knelt next to them. Their eyes were dilated. “You’re on drugs,” he said.

  Abrams shook his head. “Not drugs, friend.” His awareness seemed to stir, and he stared at Kwazi hard. “Hey, you’re him . You’re the hero, man.”

  You mean the Hollow Man.

  “Yeah, that’s me. I’m the hero,” he said. Whatever it took to get them to vacate. Or wait, what the hell—he could just find anot
her spot, right?

  “If anyone deserves a little nirvana, it’s you, man.” Abrams reached out, but Kwazi withdrew.

  “I don’t do drugs,” he said. When you worked the mines of Mars, drugs could get you and your whole crew-family killed.

  No danger of that now .

  Fuck off .

  “No, not drugs,” Abrams said. “Better than drugs. No physical nothing. It’s all in your head, man. It’s all in your head.”

  The woman next to Abrams made a sound like a baby. Her hand flexed.

  “You’ve never felt better in your whole life,” Abrams said. “Know why?”

  Kwazi stared as the woman relaxed into her personal heaven.

  “No. Why?”

  “Because you can’t feel anything out here at all.” Abrams motioned lazily at the room, at the world around them, then thumbed his chest. “And in here? It’s whatever you want to feel, man. Whatever you want to feel.”

  Turning his eyes to Abrams, Kwazi said, “Tell me more.”

  Chapter 18

  Stacks Fischer • Approaching the Asteroid Belt

  Daisy was beginning to smell. Or maybe it was me.

  Two days in the tight quarters of the Hearse, and even the best of friends would be grating on one another. That meant Daisy and I were ready to kill each other. And if anyone was an expert on how to do that, it was Daisy and I.

  “I guess you knew the Bosswoman back in the day,” Daisy said. She seemed to feel the need to fill up the quiet. Me? I’d rather be reading a book. I’d just woken up to take the duty. In theory, she’d be asleep soon. I’d stretched my social skills and made nice during our little bug-in-a-rug surveillance operation. No need to go and undo all that effort now, I guess.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Tony loaned me out to her for a job once. It didn’t go well.”

  “Ah.” She shifted a little, stretching. “My legs are starting to cramp.”

  Unlike bigger ships, the Hearse didn’t have much in the way of making long trips pleasant. It was meant for hopping back and forth from the Earth to the Moon, not days-long journeys like this one. Drugs helped counter that, but you were stuck in your seat for long periods.

  “Hey, don’t feel the need to keep me company. You’re probably tired. Pop a relaxer, take a nap.”

  We’d shadowed the gashauler Starwind after its departure from Callisto. I figure a twelve-year-old who likes fart humor named her. An automated juice tanker full of deuterium and helium-3, the Starwind tracked a predetermined course along the Company’s Frater Lanes, headed for the dockyards over the Moon. From there its cargo would head to wherever there was a fusion reactor that needed gassing up.

  “Not really,” Daisy said. “I’m wide awake.”

  Great.

  I stared through the clear canopy of the Hearse, taking in the stars. It helped me feel less cramped. I loved my ship, but I loved it more when it was just me and her. Three’s a crowd.

  “You ever worry about dying, Fischer?”

  I turned to her and saw she was looking up at space too. Staring into that void has a way of making you feel small and large at the same time. Small because, well, compared to that you are . Large because, at the same time, it can make you feel like a part of Mother Universe.

  “What’s to worry?” I said. “When Mother Universe decides to take me into her arms, I doubt I’ll have much to say about it.” Daisy looked at me then, and I saw a seriousness in her eyes. I’d been a little flippant with my answer, so I tried to give her a better one. Her expression had earned it. “I focus on the job. Which usually means worrying about someone else dying. ”

  It’s not that I like taking a life. Sometimes it’s just a necessary thing. It’s what I get paid to do, and business is business. But no one I ever killed didn’t deserve it for one reason or another. That’s a lie, actually. I’ve made a few mistakes. I live with those every day. I wouldn’t say I have a conscience, mind you. That’d be a liability. But I do have a code. I don’t kill women. I don’t kill children. Not after—

  “Proximity alert .”

  The Hearse’s feminine voice brought us both back to reality. There was a new blip on the LiDAR screen. I’d set the ship’s navigation sensors to long range to pick up anything unusual while it was still plenty far out. A bunch of new blips were on the screen now. I tightened the sensors to focus on the immediate area of the Starwind . Most of the blips disappeared.

  “We’re on the edge of the Belt,” Daisy said.

  “Thanks for that. I thought it might be hail or something.”

  She ignored me and reviewed the navigation plot. Frater Lane flight paths were auto-fed into ship navigation by the subspace satellite network connecting the breadth and depth of the SynCorp empire. Using those faster-than-light frequencies, it was easy to account in real time for the movement of foreign bodies like asteroids. Daisy was making sure the sensors were talking nice-nice to the nav computer. She needn’t have bothered. The Hearse always takes care of me.

  We knew we were in the Asteroid Belt because the nav computer told us we were. Those blips on the LiDAR screen, for instance. The myth of the Belt is that asteroids are flying this way and that like bugs in a jungle—if you’re not careful, you’ll get squashed. The reality is there’s lots of space in space. Asteroids are easily maneuvered around.

  “Sure you don’t want to catch some shut-eye? Me and the Hearse, we got this.”

  I tried not to sound too anxious for it. I was looking forward to diving into a Dashiell Hammett novel. Maybe The Thin Man or The Maltese Falcon . I was bored. The appearance of a few big space rocks isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

  See what I did there?

  “What’s that?” Daisy said.

  Well, I guess that was a no. I followed her finger. We were close enough to have visual on the Starwind .

  “In the business, we call that an asteroid.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No, I’m sure that’s what we call it in the business.”

  “Fischer, shut up and look .”

  I did. For some reason my eyes always work better when my mouth is closed.

  I saw what Daisy saw. One of the asteroids seemed to be moving toward the Starwind . That wasn’t what was odd. It’s not like all the billions of asteroids in the Belt swirl around in a circle like you see in the vids. The hauler’s nav system should pick up on it and adjust the course within the defined boundaries of the Frater Lanes as a matter of routine. But the tanker wasn’t doing that. It proceeded upon its predetermined course.

  Meanwhile, the asteroid seemed to be accelerating.

  “There’s another one,” Daisy said.

  “I see it. Make that two more.”

  “Huh,” she said.

  Huh is right. Those weren’t asteroids .

  “Canopy: opaque,” I said. “Engage stealth mode, darling.”

  “What?” Daisy said.

  “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  The starfield above us dimmed. I’d engaged the Hearse’s darkglass. We could still see out, though we relied more now on our sensors. But the canopy above us was now as black to external observers as the rest of the Hearse. The engines cut off, and Newton’s First Law became our fuel.

  “Now that’s fucking genius,” Daisy said. There was an air of wonder in her voice. You don’t much hear that from an assassin. We’re rarely surprised.

  “Thanks,” I said. “The Hearse—”

  “No, idiot. Look at that .”

  The rock-ships had hooked up to the hauler. They were siphoning gas off without the Starwind ever slowing down. But they weren’t getting much. I remembered what Tony said, that the amount of gas taken was so slight, only a paranoid bean counter would notice it. The first of the rock-ships had already detached and was moving off. Another was maneuvering to take its place. They were like mosquitos drawing blood from a body in motion.

  Who were these pirates, anyway?

  “Why go to all that trouble camo
uflaging tankers,” Daisy mused.

  I grunted. It really was an ingenious operation. Tony would’ve been impressed. Right after he had me execute the perps for stealing from him.

  “Remember how they showed up,” I said, nodding at the sensor screen. “They look just like asteroids. Maybe the pirates outfitted the hulls with real rock, or maybe it’s just rock-shaped hull. In any case, unless you’re looking at them, you wouldn’t know they weren’t asteroids.”

  “Where the hell is the fleet?”

  That was a goddamned good question. Fleet Admiral Matthias Galatz was supposed to be out here tracking down these guys. You’d think he’d be staking out the Frater Lanes or tracking the Starwind like we were. He didn’t have the reputation of a slacker. I had to wonder if he’d ever played pirate as a kid, though.

  “Proximity alert.”

  The Hearse, warning us again. I glanced at the sensors, expecting to see an asteroid, real or fake, getting a little too close for comfort. If only we’d been so lucky.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Uh-oh?”

  I indicated the display. On the edge of the screen, the faint shape of a ship’s hull appeared, outlined by the pings from our sensors. It was moving fast. Toward us.

  “Uh-oh,” Daisy said.

  “It’s okay,” I said, tapping a few controls. I made Newton work for his supper, and we glided on momentum. I didn’t want our thrusters kicking in to correct our course and showing the new guy where we were. The Hearse was a blackhull, a stealth ship. The new guy’s sensors should slide right over us and move on.

  “Keep quiet,” I whispered. “So they don’t hear us.”

  Daisy gave me a look. The sensors had filled in more of the ship’s outline. It was big. Frigate-sized big .

  “I’m kidding,” I said. “Sound doesn’t travel in—”

  “Stealth ship, heave to and prepare to be tractored,” said a voice over comms. Somehow they’d hacked and slaved our system. That was some impressive tech. The Hearse had the best anti-hack software around. “Any attempt to escape, and we’ll fire.”

  “I thought this was a stealth ship,” Daisy said.

  “It is.”

  And that truth was a trifle disconcerting. Either the vessel closing on us had new tech that could sniff out blackhulls, or someone had told the pirates we were coming. I laid equal money on both possibilities. Make that sixty-forty, we were ratted out.