“That’s Mars,” Tamru said. “Or rather the orbit itself is. I would guess that the offset means our target is trailing behind the planet.”
“A station maybe,” ‘Elwa said.
“Something old and forgotten,” he agreed. “Or cobbled together and never on any books.”
She gave him a triumphant look. “Shall we check it out?”
“We’ll do it,” he said. “But remember this is a business opportunity. It’s not about revenge. Captain Meriadoc is worth more alive than dead.”
“I’ve told you it never was about revenge. But then you never did want to listen to your mother.”
A few days later, the Qolxad and the Jade Adder dropped out of their sequence-rigged frameshift at the target destination. “Coming around on the target,” Tamru said. ‘Elwa’s hands itched to be at the yoke, but she had given that up to her son and would not take it back. Instead, she peered at the scopes. Ahead of them a medium sized asteroid, perhaps five hundred meters across, floated dark in space, but that was a facade. It radiated heat, as sure a sign as any of human settlement.
“Separate from sequence-rigging,” she said. “Adder, come around topside. Let’s make sure we have our angles covered.”
Rolf acknowledged, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Adder rotate and perform a short burn.
As they closed to less than a hundred kilometers, the scopes gave a better sense of what they were looking at. “There’s a large hangar,” she reported, “perhaps half the volume of the asteroid. It appears to be occupied. And there are also at least four gun turrets, though considering their placement, I expect at least two more.”
“Do I order gunners to take them out?” Tamru asked.
“Negative. Not yet. No shooting until we ascertain if this is our quarry.” She paused. “Forget that. I’ve identified the ship in the hangar. It’s the Mordant Jewel. Have the gunners disable the station’s weapon emplacements. Adder, park outside that hangar, just don’t give anyone a clear shot at you in case they have other heavy weapons. As long as the Jewel is trapped, the fight is already over.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The Qolxad burned retro rockets and whipped around the back of the asteroid. Like precise clockwork, the station’s defenses were targeted and destroyed. ‘Elwa nodded with pride. Her people knew their job. “Come around on the bottom, Tamru. Their power plant is exposed. We’ll park and wait for Meriadoc to show face. If things get ugly, we can shut off his whole station.”
It took only a few minutes before they were hailed. “Well, Gabby,” Captain Meriadoc said. “This was a rude way to awaken an old man in the middle of the night.”
She allowed herself a tight smile. “And you’ve misplaced your streak of arrogance. It’s over. I’ve won.”
“Maybe, but we’ll get to that in a minute. I’ve been going out of my way to avoid your ships, you know.”
“And I’ve been trying to find you. Funny how the game has changed.”
“It took you long enough to track me down.” The comm went silent for a moment. “I’m sorry about Kofi. There wasn’t any profit in his death.”
She bit her cheeks in anger. “Unfortunately for you, there’s profit for me in your capture. So let’s stake out the rules of the game. You surrender and I win a king’s ransom, or you play stubborn, and I have to settle for blowing that station out from under you.”
He tsked softly. “There’s a third option and I choose it with no shame. I wait you out. You see there’s a few hundred good and trusty folk on my station. The wives and children of my men. They have lives too, you know. You wouldn’t dare kill them just to get to me. Then the game gets interesting. Who gets backup first? Do you get enough to storm the station, or do I get enough to chase you off?”
“I choose option four,” ‘Elwa said and cut the call. She keyed the comm for an open channel transmission. “This is Gebre’elwa aboard the Qolxad. Captain Meriadoc is using you and your families as hostages. His reign of terror ends today one way or the other. Allow me to make an offer to all who live on the station. Overthrow your captain and deliver him to me, and I will grant you one-third of his bounty price to divide equally among you all. Then I will take stewardship of this station. Your lives will be your own. You may perhaps find employment with me, or you may seek your fortunes elsewhere. You have ten hours.”
She turned to Tamru. “Broadcast that on repeat. I think it will only be a matter of time now.”
Six hours later, they got the call. Meriadoc, along with most of his lieutenants, was in custody awaiting transfer to the Qolxad. The crew of the Mordant Jewel had mutinied against their leader at last. Some wanted the reward. Some wanted a better life. ‘Elwa only cared that the deed was done.
“Do you wish to speak to him?” Tamru asked.
‘Elwa could see that he was nervous. What did he think, that she would scream and rage at him or perhaps kill him herself? The Martian governments would do that for her. There was no need for her to ever lay eyes on that miserable man. She shook her head gently and wiped away a tear. “No, I don’t believe I will.”
V.
IN THE END, MOST OF the station’s inhabitants stayed. ‘Elwa took it over as a service station for her ships and made it her base of operations. The bounty money was quietly saved away for a later date. There was a super freighter with her name on it, and she already knew what she was going to name it.
When the noise and excitement died down a few days later, Tamru found her in her new office, staring out at the stars. Meriadoc had insisted on all viewports being covered to keep light from leaking, but ‘Elwa had reversed that policy immediately.
“You know I’m not quite sure what I expected to feel,” she said as he sat on the couch. “I’ve spent years waiting for this. And now it has come and gone in a whimper.”
“I thought you were going to kill him,” he said.
She cracked a wry smile. “Your mother told you she wasn’t in it for revenge. Justice will suffice, and he’ll meet the hangman soon enough. And yet...”
“And yet, what were you looking for?”
She had spent thousands of hours searching for the pirate. It had been something of an obsession, coursing through her veins like poison. And she had certainly hated Meriadoc with all her soul. But that was ash now, insubstantial remains of a fire long spent. In the distance, Mars was a pale red disc, its ice caps just barely discernible at this range. She stared at it for a long moment before turning back to Tamru. “I don’t think I even knew what I was looking for until it was over,” she said. “Closure. I wanted closure.”
He folded his hands together. “And did you get that? Can you finally lay dad to rest after all these years?”
She pondered his question for several minutes before forming the beginning of an answer. “I don’t think closure works that way,” she said sadly. “Who can say where lies the end of grief? A lost loved one never returns.” She shook her head. “There is no closure. Only a slow diminishing until what was once fiery pain is but an echo. And maybe that’s not so terrible a thing. In ten years, I’ll think of your father and be grieved, but it will be less than the day before. I think I can live with that. It’s enough hope to keep going. And if all our hopes are true and there is a reunion beyond the walls of night...” She turned back to the window as her eyes filled with tears. Tamru joined her and put an arm around her shoulders, drawing her close. “Then at long last,” she said, “there will be closure.”
Chapter 10: Summer’s End
Take a visit to most colonies and you’ll see a familiar sight. The bones of a world lost, from a seemingly ancient past or else a never achieved future. You know what I mean. You’ve seen them yourself. Pieces of infrastructure and grand public buildings, engineering feats that humanity never rose far enough to achieve on our own.
The floating cities of Venus. The Opera House of Churchill. The Resorts of Enceladus. The grav plate factories of Gilgamesh and Kyoto. The Well of Ceres. The
Silent Hall of Dione. Each is a wonder beyond our imagining.
But Moses was selective in the way he bestowed his gifts. For the most part, he allowed us to settle and found colonies after our own fashion. We built cities as we did on earth, though beneath the care of Moses’ protective technologies. But even then, the Mosaic frigates would descend, and legions of robots would construct something that would change a colony forever.
Some of the wonders have been lost in the last century. Two of the cities of Venus have sunk beneath the clouds. The Orbital Tether of Titan fell forty years ago, leaving devastation across its murky surface. There is no restoration for such miraculous creations as there is no resuscitation for humanity.
In ten thousand years, when our solar system is cold and uninhabited, there will remain monuments of two sorts. Those of men and those of Moses. If our ruins are ever visited by intelligent species, they will be very puzzled at the mixed archeological record we have left behind. Great works whose very foundations are laid with adamant beside concrete hovels, crumbling to dust.
Leah Foster
Department of Culture, Churchill
Died 104 AM
MILENA DRUGOVA CHECKED the feed from her camera and trackers. They were all still operational this time and she breathed a long sigh of relief.
She’d never stalked a target quite like Damon Stein. For starters, there were no good angles to surveil his apartment, something that was probably deliberate. She’d had to find public places to conceal her cameras to watch the entrances. Within a week, one of them mysteriously went offline. She’d replaced it, being far more devious about her method of occulting it. And then there was the matter of his vehicle. No sooner had her camera gone out, than the tracker on his grav car disappeared. The next day, he had a new vehicle.
He was on to her, and they played a dangerous game. He may have been an expert in assassination and sabotage, but she was the foremost surveillance expert in the colonies, and that meant eluding detection herself.
She’d spent weeks carefully charting out his life and activities. Within the first month, she had him talking to White Void, two different Yakuza groups, and government officials from at least three HiTO members. Stein seemed to have contacts with nearly every organized group in the solar system. She dutifully logged these and forwarded them to Mr. Kagurazaka in Kyoto.
Unfortunately, Stein had slipped her dragnet yesterday and hadn’t shown himself since. Which meant he might have skipped town. Without her seeing his exit vehicle, there was little chance of tracking his movements beyond Arizona. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d pulled this sort of stunt. No matter. He wouldn’t be gone for long and she’d pick his trail up again when he made an appearance. Ensuring the facial recognition alarms were set across her network, she closed the monitor and looked around her tiny living space.
This time she’d found a room on an abandoned floor of an office building. Previously boarded off, she’d cleverly loosened the door, while leaving its sealed appearance. It didn’t give her a platform for any useful cameras, but it was situated on a network hub that she was quietly stealing bandwidth from. Unfortunately, her headquarters was only about three by three meters, barely room for her cot, equipment, minifridge, and coffee pot. She sighed. It was the next best thing to staying in the five-star Gennadiya in Doch Rossiya. Well, almost.
She scooted over to her fridge and dug out a self-heating meal. Tonight’s choices were... Actually there weren’t any choices. Just the fake-baked chicken, powdered mashed potatoes, and gooey creamed corn. There was a reason it had been left an orphan as she ate everything else. She pulled the tab out and set it aside. A chemical reaction in the package began to sizzle and heat the meal to a barely warm enough temperature.
A proximity alarm beeped on her system, and she leaped to her feet. That wasn’t the facial recognition. It was the sensor she’d placed in this building to warn her of approaching hostiles. It was pinging one target. She grabbed her gun and moved into position beside the door. Perfect silence. No. There was the slightest scrape outside.
If it was Stein, she was dead. If he’d left town only to loop back and take her out when she dropped her guard, it was a move well played. Hopefully, it was just a vagrant looking for a place to spend the night.
Someone cleared their throat outside the door. “We both know you’re in there. Go ahead and open up.”
Hmm. It wasn’t Stein at least. She didn’t answer.
“Can’t anything ever be easy,” he said. “Look. We’re on the same side. Probably.”
Probably?
“I don’t know who hired you to watch Stein, but he’s recently been put on my list too.”
Maybe working for Stein and trying to get her to lower her guard. Still no good.
“My name’s Ryan Thompson. I’m the Arizona Minister of Law. Your name is Milena Drugova, and you’re in this colony illegally.”
She frowned. She’d never met Thompson, but she certainly knew of him. Given the number of jobs she took for law enforcement, that was unavoidable.
“Here’s what I’m going to do,” he said. “I’m dropping my gun.” There was a leaden thud outside the door. “I’m taking five steps from the door.” She heard the muffled scrape of dress shoes. “My back is to the door. My hands are behind my head.” His voice was a little muffled as he turned away. That one was harder to tell. “If you open that door and anything is amiss, I expect you to gun me down where I stand. Sound fair?”
She kicked the door open before he’d finished the last word, pistol pointed at the back of his head. He’d been telling the truth. She kicked his gun into her room. “Turn around,” she ordered.
“See,” he said as he slowly rotated. “Everything is on the up. I just want to talk.”
“Get started,” she hissed. In her mind, she was already trying to figure out how to salvage her equipment and make an escape. Running into an Arizonan high government official while spying on one of their intelligence agents hadn’t been on the itinerary.
“First, I want to know who you’re working for. That’s going to make a big difference as to what happens in the next few minutes.”
“You’re not in any position to threaten me,” she said.
“Nor you me,” he said, almost lazily. “I’ve got plenty of men outside. I’ve been waiting for Stein to leave town, so I didn’t blow your cover to have this talk. You’re in Matthew Cole’s little guild, so I assume you’re working for one of the good guys. Which one?”
It would be easy to lie, but he knew enough about her already. Maybe he already knew the answer and this was a test. “Ex-Commissioner General Kagurazaka.”
Thompson nodded. “An old friend and colleague.”
That checked out. They were both chief law enforcement officers of their respective colonies or had been until Kagurazaka retired. “What do you want?” she prodded.
“Everything you have on Stein,” he said calmly.
“He’s your own agent. Ask him yourself.”
“Come now, Ms. Drugova. We both know he’s crooked as sin. And you’re the best at what you do. So let’s make a trade. I’ll give you everything I have on him, and you give me what you’ve learned. Now, in good faith, I’m going to give you a photograph. It’s in my coat, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t shoot me when I reach for it.” She tensed as he took his left hand from his head and did as he promised. He laid the picture on the ground between them. “Go on.”
She took a cautious step forward, never once letting the gun lower, and squatted to get a look at the picture. It was Stein in what looked like some kind of standoff.
“This took place three months ago in Warszawa,” he said. “A member of Matthew Cole’s crew took this as Stein was shutting down an operation he funded. Vehicle jacking gang. Stein was purchasing the grav plates on the cheap for the Ministry of Defense.”
“The Phobos Platform,” she said.
“Precisely. Now. I want you to understand something,” Thomp
son said. “I’m domestic law enforcement. Intercolonial disputes are above my pay grade and outside my jurisdiction.” He gave her a hard look. “But if members of the administration are operating outside the law, that is my responsibility.”
Milena raised a curious eyebrow. “The little whispers on the wind tell me you’re not much of a saint yourself.”
“Says the woman coming out of Russian intelligence. Classic. There’s such a thing as scale. If members of the HiTO are running roughshod around the law to help build weapons of mass destruction, President Barclay is going to hear about it.”
“And if he’s in on it?”
“Good question. I’m more inclined to think the Ministry of Defense is the problem, but I’m open to the possibilities. Presidents are no strangers to scandal, and if the capstone of my career is sinking my own boss, I won’t care. As long as he deserves it. Now I’ll give you one more freebie about Stein. After that, you’re going to have to reciprocate.”
She nodded, and even half lowered the gun in good faith. “I’m listening.”
“I’ve got every reason to believe it was Stein that put a bullet through Matthew Cole a few months back.”
That had made the news, even before Yvonne Naude had updated all the guild members on their desperate flight to Ganymede. She hadn’t met Cole yet, but Abigail seemed to think the world of him, despite doing everything in her power not to talk about him. It would have been sweet really, how oblivious she was, if it hadn’t been a little eye rolling. If Stein had hurt Abigail’s friend, then Milena owed it to the woman to make sure he paid.
She regarded Thompson for another long moment before finally deciding to holster her weapon. Maybe, he could make that payback happen. “I’ll have to report this conversation to my employer.”
After Moses: Wormwood Page 28