by Wesley Chu
No sooner did James walk ten steps into the room than he found two burly men on either side of him. He didn’t miss a beat as he eyed both men up and down, making note of the weapons in their hands. One had a close-range ion hand cannon and the other an exo-chain.
“Are these guys really necessary?” asked James.
Hubbs shrugged. “You know how it is, can’t trust anyone these days, can we? You blue with this?”
“Blue,” James replied.
Exo-chains were the bane of exo wielders, and moderately rare due to the fact that exos were expensive and not common in regular armies. Once an exo-chain was attached, it prevented the wielder from activating his exo. If the exo was already on, it prevented the creation of new coils and leashed the wielder to the chain’s length.
James didn’t trust Hubbs to be completely unarmed, but he had little choice in the matter, especially since he was here for a favor.
The exo-chain, a red lasso made of energy, struck his body with a jolt and latched onto him. Hubbs, holding on to the handle, led him into a small waiting room. He signaled for James to sit on a settee and walked to a small bar on one end of the room. He took out a decanter and two glasses. “Whiskey drinker, right?”
A shudder coursed through James as his body suddenly tightened. His mouth dried up and he found himself having trouble formulating words. One drink could very easily slip into a binge. He shook his head. “I’m on the job.”
Hubbs paused and then looked back at James. At his hands in particular. He nodded. “I appreciate a man who can keep them separate.” He poured himself a glass of a dark red liquid and brought a glass of water to James. He sat down on the couch opposite him and leaned back. “What can I do for you? Looking for work? I run a top-notch operation. We can always use another Tier-1.”
“I’m actually recruiting.”
Hubbs looked surprised. “A couple months out of the agency and already growing an operation? Color me impressed. Didn’t think you had the entrepreneurial chops. Funny, thought I would have heard of a new player in this exclusive market.”
“I’m not working the market.” James mulled over the next thing he was going to say. “I need things salvaged.”
“Why don’t you just do it your…” Hubbs stopped. “You miasmaed out, didn’t you? How badly?”
“Next jump, perhaps. The one after, definitely.”
“I see.” There was an awkward silence, and then Hubbs slapped his knees with his hands enthusiastically. “Very well then, a client. Even better. Tell me what you’re after and I can give you a quote. Can’t guarantee I’ll be the one jumping, though. I am expensive.”
James took a deep breath. This was the part where he expected to get thrown out of the room. “That’s the thing, Hubbs. I’m not hiring. I’m recruiting for a cause.”
He told the ex-chronman as much of the story as possible without giving away the details, glossing over Elise and Sasha and focusing on how they might be able to cure the Earth Plague. He watered down the conflict with the Co-op and avoided telling Hubbs how little resources the Elfreth actually had, especially that they couldn’t keep a salvager on retainer. Instead, he tried to appeal to Hubbs’s concern for humanity’s greater good. Hubbs was already wealthy. What could he acquire to fulfill his life even more? Why not fight for a cause? Why not create a legacy that would outlive him?
James knew early into his pitch that he had failed. He watched as Hubbs’s eyes glazed over and his face seemed to melt. James continued anyway, the words tumbling out of his mouth faster and faster. “When we succeed,” James concluded, “you will go down in the chronostream as one of the most important and influential people in history. What do you think?”
There was a pregnant pause. Hubbs didn’t move from his spot. He didn’t reach for his drink. He didn’t even seem to be breathing. He just stared at James good and long before he finally spoke. His words didn’t inspire any confidence.
“James Griffin-Mars.” Hubbs smacked his lips as if rolling the name in his mouth. “I have killed men for wasting less time than you did just now.” He put up a finger. “Well, this explains why you have that massive bounty on your head. I haven’t seen anyone debut on the bounty list that high since someone offed the CEO of Burning Storm. I didn’t think the rumors were true, about you breaking the first Time Law, but it seems I was wrong to believe that you couldn’t be that stupid.”
James opened his mouth to respond when Hubbs silenced him with a hand and picked up the exo-chain. “I’m talking and you’re not going to interrupt. In fact, you’re done talking. The smart thing to do right now is to hand you over to ChronoCom and collect that fat reward, except for the fact that the one on my head is still larger than yours, so collecting the bounty could get awkward.
“You’re toxic, James Griffin-Mars, and your being here puts the colony at risk. But because we have history—I still remember what you did covering for me on Venus—I’m not going to turn you in or kick you out of the colony. Not yet. You’ve got thirty days to finish your business at Bulk’s Head. That should be plenty of time for every other salvager here to turn you down, and that’s what’s going to happen once you pitch your moronic cause. After those thirty days, you’re gone, understand?”
James nodded.
“Now get the fuck out of here. Forget you ever saw me. One more thing,” he called after James as the two burly men led him out the door. “Don’t cause any problems in my backyard. You get only one strike here in Bulk’s Head.”
James was unceremoniously hustled out of the Puck Pirate section of the colony with a warning to never return. That meeting pretty much went exactly as he’d expected. The illegal salvagers, especially, had long abandoned the moral directives ChronoCom professed in saving humanity. It was a lost cause, but one he had to embrace.
He returned to their quarters and found Grace Priestly busy with her own project. She looked up from her work as he walked in, downtrodden. She nodded when he told her how the meeting went. “Shot down by the Puck Pirates’ main salvager? Might as well flame out starting at the top. Maybe one of the smaller operators will see the nobility of our quest.”
James snorted. “I doubt it. The whole meeting was pretty humiliating.”
She shrugged. “The Puck Pirates’ salvager was never going to say yes to you anyway. He just wanted to know what you were doing here on Bulk’s Head, probably wanted to make sure you weren’t trying to muscle in on his business. Now that he knows you’re on a quixotic quest that’s doomed to fail, he’ll probably just leave you alone.”
“Now that you put it that way, I somehow feel even worse,” he grumbled. “What’s a quixotic quest?”
She smirked. “You are, James.”
He walked over to her table and looked at the fast-scrolling vid. “How is your new criminal empire doing?”
“Fantastic.” She beamed, rubbing her hands together. She was clearly having too much fun at the moment. “I have a large deal in the works between three parties for a chron database access hack. Playing them off against each other at the moment.”
As one of the brightest minds in history, she had quickly become the scourge of the information market on Bulk’s Head. Since Grace started with only few contacts and assets to barter with, she began by brokering small deals. A tech needed a V1 apropros extender, a collector wanted a twenty-second-century organic portrait, a mercenary needed repairs on his flak armor, and a smuggler needed a way to sneak into Europa Orbital Port, and Grace would somehow tie all of these clients together so everyone got what they needed. All for a small fee, of course.
In under a week, she moved up to bigger and more lucrative projects: business mergers and classified information, and even brokered a kidnapping exchange. In a frighteningly short span of time, she somehow managed to worm her way deep into the highly volatile and lucrative underground trade network and grow a fair-sized information brokerage within the colony.
“For now, I have some information to expedite your search.” Two messages
appeared in his AI band. “Someone owed me a favor and provided me lists of salvagers and doctors for you to hit up. Pay them a visit and see if any would consider helping our cause.”
James went over the lists of nineteen salvagers and forty doctors and cross-referenced them with the list of Bulk’s Head alliances he was cobbling together. Seventeen of the doctors were indentured to various crime syndicates or gangs. They would be protected and off-limits.
That left just a few independents. He had to persuade them to accept what limited scratch they had to come pay Sasha a visit on Earth. James was not beneath kidnapping them outright, though that was a sordid business. Kidnapping skilled technical and medical labor was considered one of the more heinous crimes in the solar system. James wasn’t ready to go that far yet. However, for Sasha, he was starting to consider it.
Grace also sent him an updated figure of how much scratch he had to work with. He grimaced. “That’s it?”
“I need the rest for cash flow. You need scratch to make scratch,” she said defensively. “When I’m done getting what I need, you can use the rest.”
James spent the remainder of the day visiting three salvagers and seven of the doctors on the list, confirming they weren’t interested in coming to Earth. The cheapest doctor quoted five times the scratch he was allocated, and the salvagers didn’t even bother asking a price. Most just laughed, some even harder when he tried to appeal to their humanity. One of the salvagers threatened to kill him for being too stupid to live.
James spent over an hour with the last doctor, at one point simultaneously pleading and threatening to get the poor man to come to Earth, half promising riches and half making death threats. He couldn’t help it. His sister’s life was on the line, and no one seemed to care a whit about it.
By evening, he was so frustrated, he wanted to break something. Disheartened, he dragged his exhausted body back to the residence. This was a fool’s errand, one that kept him away from Elise and Sasha. That’s where he belonged, not here in the middle of the Ship Graveyard begging criminals to join a hopeless cause.
He stood outside the door to their residence and thought about telling Grace just that. They should just abort this. They both should be somewhere else. He should be at home protecting his loved ones. She should be working on the cure to the Earth Plague. He worked up the courage to tell her to pack up and walked in the door.
Grace hadn’t moved from the table. She saw the look on his face when he stormed inside and focused her attention back on the vid. “You look exhausted. Get some sleep.”
“Grace,” he began. “We should reconsider—”
“Pet.” Eyes still glued to the screen, she pointed at the bed. “The answer is no. You still have the majority of the salvagers and doctors to talk to.”
“We’re wasting our time here.”
She tore her gaze away from the screen and spoke to him in a measured tone, as if talking to a child. “The TIs have a saying: before making decisions of consequence, count the stars. Why don’t you do that first thing in the morning?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means get some rest and do your damn job, for space’s sake.” She stood up and folded her arms. “James, I’m speaking to you as the High Scion right now. Call it a day and get some rest. You’ll have better luck tomorrow.”
“Yes, Grace.”
“Call me High Scion. I’m revoking your first-name privileges until you stop sniveling.”
James sighed and went to bed.
EIGHT
REINFORCEMENTS
Kuo stood behind the windowpane and looked down at the masses milling on the Chicago streets just north of ChronoCom’s Earth Central campus. The dense crowds were immense, almost frightening for someone from Europa and used to the limited and comforting, controlled environments of the civilized colonies on the Outer Rims. She fixated on one of the large intersections, six lanes by six, and watched in bemusement as the logjam of pedestrians, vehicles, and beasts of burden waged a war of inches.
The worst part of what she saw below was that there were millions of people in the city, and not one of them was relevant. These weren’t Valta’s demographics. Market research had calculated that only 6 percent of Earth’s consumers had anything more than a four-times-removed association with any of the megacorp’s bottom line. In other words, Kuo had very little business here on this disgusting planet, and she couldn’t wait to get off Earth as soon as possible.
The past week, while she had been at Earth Central, Kuo, for some reason, had found herself gravitating to this office and staring at the chaotic activity outside, at the same time fascinated and horrified by the planet of her species’ origin. The director had the best view in the building. He had gotten so used to her coming and going that he didn’t even bother addressing her anymore.
“Director,” she remarked, still studying the traffic jam trying to untwine itself. “Why do you allow this to continue?”
Young Hobson-Luna, the high director of ChronoCom on Earth, looked up from the book he was buried in. “Allow what to happen, Securitate?” He got up from his chair and hobbled next to her, his twisted leg dragging behind him, slightly off balance because of his amputated arm. He followed her gaze to the churning streets below. “Why do we allow traffic?”
Kuo pointed down at the mess below and then up at the heavy skyway traffic of flying vehicles in similar lanes coming in and out of the city. She gestured at the gray and brown wind, visible to the naked eye, blowing past the window. “This planet is a mess and has been for six hundred years. Look at the waste. Unforgivable. Yet, you let it continue. If ChronoCom is truly interested in preserving resources for humanity’s survival, the first thing you should do is declare martial law on the planet, quarantine the savages, and allocate the remaining resources for optimal use.”
“You mean turn Earth into a supply depot for the megacorporations?” Young answered dryly. “Unbridled capitalism poses similar threats.”
Kuo scoffed and walked to Young’s cabinet to help herself to his liquor. She poured two glasses of red wine and handed one over to him. She held it up and waited until he clinked glasses and took a sip. Even someone dosed with an antidote beforehand would have just a slight hesitation in drinking poison. It was human nature. Not that she distrusted the man. However, coming from the world of cutthroat corporatism, old habits died hard. In this case, the director passed.
She raised her glass in a toast and sipped. “Humanity is at a precipice. Like it or not, the corporations are the only thing staving off extinction. It’s been proven again and again throughout history that governments are not up to the task.”
“What would Valta do if they were in the agency’s place as the only authority of Earth?” asked Young.
“Now is the time to act decisively, Director. You might consider those dirty masses outside people; I consider them the greatest waste of resources in the solar system. A person is either a contributor to or a burden on society. Waste in this time and age is a sin. It must be eliminated.”
“So you would commit genocide?”
“Don’t be absurd.” Kuo shook her head. “Valta does not waste. We’re not monsters. The corporation is practical and recognizes that there is skill and talent among the population. We simply have to sort the wheat from the chaff. The rest will be shorn in order to allow the greater good to survive.”
“And how do you intend to judge who is worthy of survival?” asked Young, his eyes glinting. He looked down at his broken body. “I assume I would get culled with the rest of the trash?”
Kuo rolled her eyes. “Please, Director, you insult us. You obviously have not met our CEO. Zu Wen-Europa has been wheelchair-bound since he was four years old. Your experience, leadership, and wise decision making”—she emphasized the last three words—“are what makes you worthy. Otherwise, yes, there is little reason to have you around.”
“Thank you for deeming me of some value.” He bowed, making an ela
borate but comical gesture with his bent, one-sided body.
The sarcasm wasn’t lost on Kuo. As much as she enjoyed making her point, she knew better than to continue digging at the high director of ChronoCom. He was more useful as an ally, for now.
“Down to business then, shall we?” She placed the wineglass on his desk and sat down. “I ordered more monitors for the next phase of my project. Why has this not happened yet?”
“Yes, about that,” Young said, taking a seat opposite her. “I put that on hold until we can have a discussion. You don’t requisition a tenth of my available monitor ranks without speaking with me first.”
“Good,” Kuo said. “Now that we’ve spoken, when will the five hundred monitors be ready?”
“What do you intend to use them for?” he asked.
“Does it matter?”
There was a long silence. Young spoke in a slow, measured tone. “ChronoCom is not your supply depot either, Securitate.”
“We’re owed this support, Director.”
“You were owed five hundred monitors and support personnel, which you were given.”
“Now I need more.”
“Not with the way you’re deploying them, you don’t. Why are the casualties so far eighty percent ChronoCom personnel? You are abusing this relationship.”
“I am leveraging the resources available to me in the most efficient way possible.” She shrugged. “I brought highly skilled, specialized operatives for the project. Your monitors and newly raised chronmen are less skilled and more expendable.”
For a second, Kuo thought the director had found a backbone. Young leaned forward, and, pressing his good hand down on the desk, rose to his feet. His eyes flashed, and he looked as if he was going to say or do something interesting. Kuo almost activated her exo. Almost. After a few seconds of intensity, the broken administrator she had come to know became whom she thought he was.
“ChronoCom did not sign on to take the brunt of this operation. We acknowledge what is contractually due, but we expect compensation to cover our costs and resources.”