by Thorne Moore
‘What are you?’ demanded Abigail imperiously.
‘In command of this ship and of you. That’s all you need to know.’
‘Who put you in command?’
‘I did, Miss Dieterman. That’s what the deregulated zone is all about. Out here, we are all free to pursue our potential. There are no laws, no rules, no limits.’
‘So, if there is no law...’ began Merrit.
Tod smiled, eyes narrowing, waiting for him to figure it out.
‘You can’t command anything – because we can do what we like.’
‘Ah, Mr Burnand. You’ve grasped the rationale of the deregulated zone. And what exactly would you like to do? Theft? Rape? Graffiti on the lavatory wall? This is the truth: if you fancy doing something, you do it. If you want something, you take it. There’s no law to prevent you. Or to protect you. You could kill me, Merrit.’ The wolf smile flashed again. ‘And I can kill you.’
‘Why?’ asked Merrit, in alarm.
Tod appraised him, head on one side. ‘Because I feel like it? Because I’ve had enough of your devaluation of perfectly good expletives? Or I might simply suspect that you are planning to kill me. Pre-emptive action is always the safest course.’
‘Hey, look, I’m not planning anything!’
‘So you claim, but should I believe you? How shall we deal with this impasse, Merrit?’ Tod stubbed out his cigarette on the bar, before giving the answer. ‘Negotiation. A wonderful term. It covers everything that goes on in the Outer Circles. We negotiate.’
‘Well, all right...’
‘It doesn’t have to be verbal negotiation,’ added Tod. Before they were aware, he had a knife in his hand and flicked it with casual accuracy. It nicked Merrit’s ear in passing, before pinging off the pillar behind him. Merrit shrieked as if he’d been skewered through the heart and clamped a hand to his ear to staunch the trickle of blood.
‘We just have to reach a mutual understanding,’ continued Tod amiably, springing down from the bar and retrieving the knife. ‘Perhaps we already have.’
‘I don’t know what you want!’ whined Merrit.
‘Watch, listen, learn,’ said Tod, examining the wounded ear dispassionately. ‘And you might find out. Ignorance is not bliss in the Outer Circles. It’s death. You have eight months to think about it.’ He clicked his heels in farewell. ‘Live long and prosper, children.’
They stared after him.
‘Jesus!’ Merrit was quivering with shock. ‘Fuck it! I’m stuck on a ship with a fucking homicidal maniac!’
‘Hardly,’ said Selden.
‘He could have killed me!’
Abigail sighed. ‘Maybe that was the point. He could have, but he didn’t.’
‘Yet! He’s just a bloody pirate.’
‘It’s not right,’ said Maggy. The wail that had been building in her found its way out at last. Nothing was fair. ‘It’s not right! He shouldn’t be allowed!’
The others were staring at her in disbelief.
‘He’s an impostor!’
Smith laughed. ‘Aren’t we all?’
‘Yes, we know you are,’ said Christie.
‘No! He’s not!’ Maggy panicked. Smith was all she had left. She couldn’t let him escape. But of course, he was an imposter, he’d confessed as much. ‘I mean, yes he is, but he has to be. It’s not the same!’ It was all slipping. He was laughing at her. They were all laughing. ‘It’s different. He’s a Seccor secret agent. Under cover. Tell them!’
Christie wiped tears away. ‘Oh Maggy, Maggy, he’s been telling the whole ship for months. Secret agent, my eye. He’s just a crook. An actor who discovered that all the world’s a stage, and con-artistry is more profitable than Shakespeare. A thief.’
Smith looked mortified. ‘I was hoping for a few more superlatives.’
Maggy’s last bastion cracked beneath her. ‘What do you mean? What does she mean? She’s lying. Tell them, you’re an agent.’
‘I am on the Seccor agents list,’ said Smith brightly. ‘Though they might have difficulty finding someone who could actually identify me.’
‘You’re probably on some of their other lists too,’ suggested Christie.
‘Certainly not! Never been caught, never even been suspected.’
‘La crème de la crime.’
‘Not the only one hiding my light under a bushel, am I?’ Smith snatched up a bottle, tossed it, caught it with the other hand and waved it like a magician’s wand at Christie. ‘Yasmin Gwynne, ladies and gentlemen. Executive head of Information and Promotion at Ragnox Incorporated, no less. La crèmiest de la grime. But passing herself off as a derelict wino. I, for one, am totally convinced. Clearly method acting.’
‘Uh?’ said Merrit, concisely.
‘Yes, I was Yasmin Gwynne.’
‘Screwed up more lives than other people have had hot dinners.’
‘I already knew,’ said Abigail. ‘Is that it? Any more revelations?’
‘Well, I don’t know.’ Smith grinned. ‘Maggy, what do you think? Any more revelations?’
Maggy turned white.
‘Any more imposters among us?’
‘Shut up!’
‘You want to know who our little Maggy really is? A complete sham, right down to her dainty dirndl skirts.’
The alteration was dramatic enough to create a ripple of shock. Maggy’s soft doe eyes burned suddenly with hatred. Her fists clenched. ‘Shut up! Shut up!’
‘Clytemnestra Jameston,’ said Smith. ‘You might have heard of her if you’re into extremely grubby pornography. Do you realise the theatre was offering samples of your work a few weeks back, Maggy? Clytemnestra is buried in Seccor’s deepest, darkest files: the prostitute paid by Agent Schilling to sell out her own family to an anti-terrorist squad. Doesn’t look like a girl who had her mother, brothers and sisters gunned down, does she? And all for a Ragnox contract.’
For a second or two, Maggy stood motionless, rigid, not even breathing, while the others stared in disbelief and disgust. It seemed she must surely collapse, in tears or hysterics. Instead, she lashed out, raking Smith’s cheek with her nails, her face twisted and savage, before running from the room.
‘Ah.’ Smith touched his cheek, then looked at smears of blood on his fingers.
‘God, I hope that hurts,’ said Yasmin.
‘Shit!’ said Merrit. ‘You kidding? Sold out her family?’
‘So the records say,’ said Smith, concentrating on some impromptu first aid.
‘No wonder she had to run,’ said Abigail.
‘Maggy wasn’t running,’ said Smith. ‘She thought she’d arrived and was eating Foie Gras to the sound of trumpets. And I’ve just crumbled her water biscuit.’
Clytemnestra Jameston. There it was, like a nasty smell clinging to her heels whenever she thought she had broken free. The name, and the identity that went with it.
Or lack of identity. Clytemnestra Jameston was a non-person.
There was no knowing why she belonged to that tribe. Some wrong choice in the distant past or just an accident of economics. Her tribe didn’t go to corporation-sponsored schools, they didn’t swim in the pool of eager little fish from which the corporations drew their pliant workforce, they didn’t have corporate-funded insurance, or pensions, or health care. They were just a nasty sore, a sink of the degraded, condemned to take any noisome work on offer, surviving on crime, violence and prostitution, because – no reason, just because.
That indefinable difference between belonging and not belonging determined who should rise and who should grovel. What had her mother been? A silly, irresponsible woman, no different to Abigail Dieterman. A woman who liked her gin too much, no different to Christie Steen, or Yasmin Gwynne or whoever she was. A woman susceptible to men, no different to those pampered dames crooning over that fraud, Commander Foxe, all the way to Ganymede. But they were indulged and respected, while Dolly Jameston had spent her life being persecuted for drunkenness and soliciting.
Her
six children were automatically condemned to the same world, Patroclus embroiled in a protection racket, Iphigenia brain dead from drug abuse, Agamemnon busy gun-running. Jocasta and her band of crooks may have spouted endless radical jargon, but they’d still been crooks.
Their criminality was so inevitable that their activities were almost tolerated. As long as they targeted only their own and the most peripheral limpets of the system, they were left to wallow. It was Jocasta’s revolutionary talk that had drawn the attention of Seccor to the Jameston family. Jo, with her stupid whining about justice and the environment and evil corporations. Clytemnestra wanted none of that. She didn’t want the corporations destroyed, she just wanted in.
It was her eldest sister she wanted to emulate; Aphrodite. Affy the striptease artiste who had caught herself a husband from the other side of the great divide. An insignificant little man, working for a small construction subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Astromarina, second only to Ragnox in the corporate world. Affy’s husband had a contract!
Once safely married, Aphrodite had cut off all contact with her family, but Clytemnestra yearned to follow. She devoured books that taught the nice ways of the nice world even while she led a life that wasn’t nice at all. But none of the customers for her expert fellatio services turned out to be Corporation employees in search of a wife. Her dreams were turning sour, seeping into the acrid cinders of her ghetto existence – until the man from Seccor Anti-terrorism picked her up one day as she worked her street corner in the rain. Agent Schilling.
His colleagues knew her sort and wanted to kick answers out of her, but he’d used persuasion. The sensation of being wooed was so novel, so delicious, that she’d been utterly spell-bound. Just for once in her life, authority was willing to recognise and reward her.
So when Jo had come home, with her grimy seditious comrades, Clytemnestra slipped out and called him, and he, like any normal client trawling the streets, picked her up and deposited her at a safe distance, before joining his colleagues for the raid.
All they’d wanted were Jo’s fellow terrorists. Just for questioning. Nothing nasty. He had promised.
If she knew he was lying, she wouldn’t admit it, even to herself. Nothing would happen, he’d said.
But something had happened. She could tell, from the distant firing, the smoke, the screaming, the roar and crackle, that something had gone very wrong.
They told her that her family was dead. Cross fire. All wiped out in a blood bath, and Agent Schilling with them. She was stunned with grief or guilt, or just confusion. They offered her a new identity, pleading with her to accept, not realising that a new identity was the one thing, above all others, that she’d always wanted. In preparation, she acquired clerical skills with the same unimaginative thoroughness that she had mastered the sex manual.
Maggy Jole. Her new name. It sounded so prosaic after the stupidly fantastical names her mother had dreamed up. So very anonymous. And a contract, of course. Of course! They had spread them before her, like glass beads, while steering her remorselessly towards one. Triton. An excellent choice. Seven years, far away from any contact with her old world, out of reach of anyone who might wish to harm her. She would be a new person and at the end of it, unimaginable wealth to guarantee her status and security forever. Amen.
She’d signed her name with an inner scream of triumph. She had arrived.
For months, the scream still ringing in her ears, she’d struggled to prove that she belonged. She’d lived by the book, eaten, walked, breathed by the book. The strain destroyed any pleasure, but then, what pleasure did Maggy want? That glowing sense of enfolding comfort when Agent Schilling had praised her, all for a few words in the right ear? Repeatedly she’d tried to recapture that state of grace, but no one else responded to her whispered confidences with the same glowing approval. When she reported suspicions to Commander Foxe, he’d only smiled, sardonically. She should have guessed then that he was a fraud.
And now, with a word from that rat Smith, that lying cheating bastard, the illusion had vanished in a puff of smoke. She was revealed. Clytemnestra Jameston, the hooker from the gutter.
She picked up the silver photo frames with their fake pictures and hurled them against the wall.
Chapter 15
The observation lounge was silent as they watched the screen, perched on the brink of infinity. Beyond lay stars and darkness and more stars and more darkness, on and on forever.
Across the lower edge of the screen a countdown was flashing by. 3 minutes and 26 seconds to go. Time edged past, unbearably slow and yet horribly inescapable. Nothing could stop the steady ticking of the numbers, 3 minutes, 2, 1, the seconds dwindling inexorably towards zero.
Zero.
It flashed once and vanished. That was all. There was no blinding light, no siren, no crackling of the screen, nothing but the flash of zero to show that they had crossed the Protocol Line. They were Out.
No one spoke.
‘Yes!’ Merrit emerged triumphantly from a cupboard, shaking cereal nuggets into a bowl. ‘That’s more like it.’ He looked around for milk.
‘Dried milk,’ said Smith. ‘You need to mix it.’
Too much effort for Merrit. He tackled a large handful of the nuggets dry. Munched. Pulled a face.
‘Not good?’ Smith watched him, fascinated. ‘I think you’ll find they’re cat biscuits.’
Yasmin picked up the packet. ‘So they are.’
Merrit spat them out. ‘Christ! Why have they got fucking cat biscuits? Could have poisoned me!’
‘They don’t poison cats, do they? But there are alternatives for breakfast.’ Smith opened the oven door, and the smell of newly baked bread wafted out. Instantly they were salivating.
‘How long did that take you?’ asked Abigail,
‘Half an hour. It comes in a packet.’
‘So you weren’t up at five, busy baking.’
‘No, I was up at five, busy doing other things.’
‘What?’
‘Investigating.’
‘Investigating what?’ Abigail’s physical strength hadn’t yet returned, but she was making up for it with terrier persistence.
Smith opened a jar of jam. ‘Anything, everything, everyone.’
‘No need to investigate the commander. It’s obvious what he is. A pirate.’
Smith burst out laughing, ruefully. ‘I actually gave him a lecture on the perils of criminality in the deregulated zone. He must have been wetting himself with amusement. Pirate? Hm. He’s an independent. Out here, you’re with a corporation and you survive, or you’re an independent, you make a quick dash, grab what you can and run back to civilisation. If you don’t, you die. And yet. The Heloise, under Cap’n Tod, has made nine trips Out, four of them to Triton. The average survival rate for an independent operation out here is less than two trips. Whatever you call what he does, he’s good at it.’
Selden grunted agreement. ‘He is. The best.’
‘Which probably makes us relatively safe from forces outside the ship,’ said Yasmin. ‘Just the forces within to worry about. We’re mere cargo, remember.’
‘Up against a very small crew,’ said Smith. ‘Six altogether, unless there is a ship’s cat. I haven’t found one yet. Foxe, Addo, Siegfried, Faber and two new guys in engineering. Enough to do the work and no more. I imagine their amphetamine consumption is sky high.’
‘Addo is a Seccor major.’ Merrit smothered a wedge of hot bread with jam.
Smith was busy with the coffee machine. ‘Not Seccor. Ex-U.N.2. He left the service when Seccor took over. But an impressive record in very active service. Don’t be deceived by the mellow exterior. And don’t mistake him for Tod’s Man Saturday, whatever role-play they went in for, the other side of the Line. The ship’s really run as a partnership, the three of them, Tod Foxe, Major Addo and Will Tucker the engineer. You’ll know Tucker if you see him. The size of a bull elephant, bald as a coot, wears a gold earring. Used to be chief engi
neer on an A-class ship and can, reputedly, work wizardry with a monkey wrench.
‘The others are just temporary. Faber’s a schoolboy gone wild, sent out for a couple of years with nice Uncle Tod to learn a bit of discipline. This is his second trip. The young Siegfried: real name Tony Luciani, served time. Came on board to escape the Mob, stayed on because he’s got the hots for Tim. The other one is called Mich. No other name. A total lunatic. Either perpetually doped up or genuinely crazy. Apparently, that’s how they get, out here. Sucking his thumb one moment and cutting your throat the next. Watch him. They lost their second engineer Silas last trip on S14 – not sure how – and needed a hasty replacement. Mich was all they could get at short notice, and I gather Cap’n Tod’s keen to dump him back where they found him as soon as we get there.
‘And, of course, there’s Tod Foxe himself. What can I say?’
‘You’ve said it all,’ said Yasmin. ‘How long did it take you to find all this out?’
‘The time it took to play snooker. Faber was at a loose end. He’s too young and innocent to know when to hold his tongue.’
‘Gossip!’ said Abigail, scornfully.
‘I’ve accessed their records too. You want to know about the cargo? Our pirate king is a frustrated accountant. Records everything immaculately. Engineering parts for a water extraction plant, two containers of optical equipment, a mass spectrometer, 150 tonnes of PhS34, whatever PhS34 is. More of that ilk, and some others, really intriguing. A couple of hundred Chinese films, with subtitles. A Sèvres dinner service. What really grabs me is the crate of costumes for a cabaret on Titania. I thought it must be code, but I checked. Very slinky costumes.’ He looked at the table. ‘One piece of bread left. Toss for it?’
Selden’s hand shot out. So did Merrit’s.
‘What about Maggy?’ suggested Abigail. ‘Aren’t we keeping some for her?’
‘She’s not here,’ said Merrit, hesitating. Fatal move. Selden was already eating the bread.
‘Has she come out of her cabin at all?’ asked Yasmin.
They looked at each other and shook their heads.