by M. D. Cooper
Something about the idea that he should simply recycle himself, that he was worthless, woke an anger in Starl that shot adrenaline through his body. He wasn’t angry at her in particular, but her words struck too close to home.
Starl twisted against her thumb and broke her hold on his arm. Before she could grab him again, he put a foot sideways against the heavy door and locked it in place, positioning himself parallel to the door so she could only reach for him ineffectually.
“You really think that, Mama Chala?” he said. The squeak had come back into his voice, the sound of betrayed love. He couldn’t help it. A flood of emotions tossed him between anguish at being abandoned and fury at her carelessness. “You think I’m going to end up in a drug den? I’m the one kid in your place who’s never done anything like that. I’m the one kid who’s always done whatever you asked, even when I knew it was wrong. Even when the TSF picked me up that time, I didn’t tell them where I lived. They beat me until I couldn’t walk and I didn’t give you up.”
“You cost me a good week in an autodoc,” she spat. “That wasn’t free, boy.”
“No,” he said. “I guess it wasn’t.”
Starl pinned her arm against the door with a grip on her wrist. She tried to flex her fingers then formed a fist. He pressed his lips against her knuckles.
“Good bye, Mama,” he said. “I’m gone.”
“Gone?” she demanded. “Where are you going to go?”
“I’ll start my own crew.”
“Start your own crew?” she scoffed. Mama Chala guffawed and the door rocked against him with the power of her belly laughs. “You’ll start the janitorial crew. That’s what you’ll do. Maybe the nursery crew. Maybe they’ve got a trash collecting crew? That’s what you can do, Ngoba Starl. You don’t even have a Link yet. How can you hope to do anything in the real world? You’re still dumb as a post. You think you can make a silver spoon out of plastic, boy? You can’t see what’s in front of you.”
By 'dumb' she meant he couldn’t connect to the network, couldn’t talk to others via the Link. He could get a pirate surgeon to install the interface for him but technically he was too young, his brain hadn’t finished cooking. A pirate doctor wouldn’t care, but also wouldn’t have to worry about the side effects.
Starl released her wrist and stepped away from the door. The big woman slammed it open but only stood in the opening with her fists clenched. Behind her, crowded in the corridor, he saw the whites of all the eyes watching him from her shadow.
“You did right by me, Mama Chala,” Starl said, taking slow breaths to keep his voice under control. “I won’t ever forget that. When I can, I’ll come back and straighten up what I owe you.”
The bull-shaped woman glared at him, puffing short breaths through her nose. Her gaze went past him, then came back to his face. Her brown eyes softened slightly. She made a shooing motion.
“Ah, get out of here, then. I can’t look at you and not see a snot-nosed toddler wandered out of the trash heap. And here you are growing a beard and your hair all curly. Always so fancy, my Ngoba.”
The kindness in her voice shot through his heart but he didn’t trust her. He stood his ground in the middle of the corridor, watching her hands. Had Station Security shown up behind him? Why was she so kind all of a sudden? He wanted to look over his shoulder where her gaze had gone but knew she’d grab him the second he looked away.
“Is Zanda still here?” he asked.
“Riggs?” she asked. “He’s here. He’s sleeping down in his bunk where you should have been. He confessed like a good boy. He didn’t try to go sneaking around, acting like a man.”
Starl smiled. Her derision gave him the permission he needed to break free. He took a step backwards, waving at her. “I’ll see you around, Mama. Thank you.”
Mama Chala flushed. “Don’t you go thanking me. And don’t you try to leave here without giving your Mama Chala a hug. You hear me? You better give me one last little cuddle.”
Starl gave her a side-ways glance, considering the situation. All the times she had been kind to him flashed through his mind, the encouraging words, the cuddles that weren’t bone-breaking. . . Immediately followed a stuttering blur of painful memories, not only his but of ways she had hurt the older kids as he was growing up. She seemed to only like kids when they were five or six, when they wanted to please her and made the best servants.
He smiled. “I’ll catch you later, Mama. You take care.” Starl raised his voice for all the kids huddling behind her. “You all take care! I’ll come back for you!”
“Ngoba Starl!” Mama Chala roared.
Without looking back, Starl turned and ran as if all hell were on his tail. He hit the main corridor off the Lowspin docks and didn’t stop running until he was back up near Night Park and thought he could hear the parrots calling out names by the fountain.
5
After a long night wandering Highspin and Lowspin, cursing Cruithne, Mama Chala, his scraggly beard, and the TSF pistol that was rubbing blisters in his lower back, Starl went yawning to a public terminal and sent Zanda a message to meet him in a couple hours. Then he messaged Fug that he was ready to report on the Slarva mission.
They met in a fast-food cafe off the Lowspin docks. The entrance was an old cargo bay that opened onto the main access corridor. It was a good place to sit and watch the traffic from the docks: technicians, cargo haulers, travelers, TSF and Station Admin. Starl liked to try to determine what they did by how they carried themselves. Anyone in a uniform made the game too easy.
Fug sat at the small table, watching Zanda as if she was sure the boy was going to steal her candy. She was wearing the same green visor, still giving her skin a sickly glow.
“You know your name is a weak way of saying ‘fuck,’ right?” Zanda said.
“You’re the dumbest person I know,” Fug said.
“Come on now,” Starl said. “You two keep flirting like this and I’ll need to get another table.”
They both shot him angry looks. Starl knew that Fug hadn’t wanted Zanda at the meeting anyway, but he’d convinced her by saying Zanda could be useful in whatever Fug was planning. The ghoulish woman didn’t seem convinced but had agreed, which made Starl trust her even less – but he was desperate and Fug was the best lead on credit he had right now.
Zanda waved a hand at Fug and looked at Starl. “So you’re out for good. Really?”
Starl shrugged. “Seems so.”
“Where did you sleep last night?”
“Haven’t slept yet.” Starl rubbed his face. “I mostly walked the docks last night, thinking about all of it.”
Fug gave him a crooked grin. “So you’re finally getting out on your own. That’s good. But I didn’t come here for your coming of age story. What have you got on Slarva?”
“Wait a second,” Zanda said. “Why would Ngoba know anything about the Crash promoter?”
“I asked him to run an errand for me,” Fug said, leaning back and crossing her arms. “Follow him, tell me what he does.”
“I thought you already had the game on lock,” Zanda said.
“It never hurts to gather more information.” Fug looked at Starl. “So what did you see?”
Starl sighed. “I watched him argue with some vid producers about whether the game is rigged or not. Then I followed him to this little club just off the hangar – I mean just off the hangar. He has his own entrance. He sucked briki all night and passed out. I left after about three hours of listening to him snore.”
“You left?” Fug demanded.
“There wasn’t anything else going on. Have you ever seen anyone on briki? They’re like a bunch of toddlers giggling at each other until they pass out.”
Fug frowned. “I guess that helps a bit. Briki’s expensive.”
“Is it? Don’t they grow it on station?”
“No. It’s brought in from hydroponic farms on Ceres. Proprietary seed stock. Anybody who tries to propagate the plant gets a visit fr
om the Anderson Collective.”
“Is it true they spun up a black hole in the middle of Ceres?” Zanda asked.
“You don’t mess with the Anderson Collective,” Fug said. “They get shit done. Like pet black holes.”
“Damn,” Zanda said. “Does it blow your mind that we live in a world where people are building their own black holes and we’re stuck in this garbage heap sorting trash?”
Fug’s gaze was drawn to the people walking past the front door. Someone dropped a cup nearby and it shattered on the floor. “I’m not staying here,” she said. “I might have been born on Cruithne but that doesn’t mean I have to spend my whole life here.”
“So where would you go?” Zanda said.
The skinny girl shrugged. “Mars Protectorate for a while and then the JC.”
“You’d need a ship for the Jovian Combine, my friend,” Starl said. “That’s a lot of space in between those places. Not a lot of room to hide anywhere. You can’t outrun sensors and the computers never forget.”
“Sensors can be fooled, just like computers,” Fug said. “Humans made them. Humans make mistakes.” She kept watching the crowd. “So Slarva likes briki. That’s kind of embarrassing. Not as embarrassing as I’d hoped but it does mean that when he’s out, he’s not coming back for a solid few hours.”
“I thought you’d already had access to the controllers?” Zanda said, leaning forward. He seemed to be looking for any opportunity to make Fug look bad and the petty attacks were starting to irritate Starl.
“It’s a near-field interruption,” Fug said, ignoring the accusation in Zanda’s voice. “I can affect the controllers on a millisecond basis, blocking the inputs just long enough to slow their responses. It’s especially effective during blocks. You slow the controller’s response just enough to make them miss the counter-move, and before they know it they’re getting destroyed by a massive crash maneuver.”
“That kept happening to Brindle in that first match,” Starl said.
Fug nodded. “Exactly. I made a thousand credits on that.”
“That’s– subtle,” Zanda said, nodding with appreciation. “I’m amazed no one’s thought of it before.”
“Of course not,” Fug said. “I thought of it. I’ve got something better in mind but I can’t do it alone.”
Starl glanced around the restaurant. No one appeared to be paying attention to them. In fact, every person in the place looked so tired they wanted to collapse right in their plastic seats. It was like briki for working people. He couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to monitor a place like this but it didn’t hurt to be careful.
“Maybe we should talk somewhere else,” he suggested. “There’s a maintenance corridor not too far away that’s shielded by a water storage tank.”
“I’m not giving up any details,” Fug said. “You aren’t going to be part of the actual job. What I need you to do is run interference. It’s going to be pretty easy, actually. I want to do a test run though on tonight’s semi-final match.”
“You sure you want to give them more chances to catch your hack?” Zanda said.
“They’re not going to catch my system.” Fug spread her hands on the table and wiggled her fingers like he was manipulating an invisible controller.
Starl thought the motion made her look like a stick insect with an over-sized head.
Fug’s gaze shifted to Zanda and she looked like she wanted to bite his oblong head off and chew on it. Starl shook the image out of his mind. Fug knew Mama Chala. She knew what they were trying to get away from. He didn’t figure it would take much convincing to get Zanda out of the squat once he had the money for his own place. Then he could start talking about a crew.
“What do you want us to do?” Starl said, short-cutting their spat.
“We’ll meet up at the fountain in Night Park tonight, two hours before the match,” Fug said. “I’ll explain the screen I need. You’ll have some time to get things together and then we’ll make it happen.”
“Why not just explain now?” Zanda said.
“Because it needs to be two hours before. It needs to seem natural. How about you stop arguing with me or I tell you to go pound sand?”
“We got it,” Starl said quickly. “We got it.” He shot Zanda an angry glance. “We haven’t talked funds yet. What are you offering for this?”
Fug flexed his shoulders. “I appreciate you helping me out yesterday, Starl. The more I think about it, that’s some good info. Slarva likes to go hide and snort pollen. That’s very counter to his image on the vids. I can use that. I appreciate your help.” Her gaze slid to Zanda. “You, I don’t have much use for but Ngoba wants you here, so I’ll call that the cost of doing business. I’ll throw you a hundred each for tonight and then a thousand each for the main event.”
“What are you going to make off it?” Zanda said.
“We’ll take it,” Starl said, cutting any further debate. A hundred was enough to get his own place for a week. He would take it. He checked the time on a wall-clock near the cash register and nodded. “We’ll see you at the fountain.”
Fug gave one of her slow, thin smiles. “At the fountain,” she agreed.
6
A few hours later, Starl and Zanda met Fug at the Night Park fountain. The spiky limbs reaching out over the water were covered in black crows and gray starlings, rustling and complaining at each other. As soon Starl neared the fountain, however, a gray parrot appeared in one of the lower branches and crooned, “Ngo-ba! Ngo-ba! Hi there, Ngo-ba!”
Zanda punched him in the arm. “You make friends with parrots? How do they know your name?”
Starl stopped at the edge of the fountain and peered up in the hundreds of black bird eyes looking down on him. “That’s creepy,” he told Zanda. “I don’t know. The only bird I talked to was in a cage.”
“Distributed system,” Fug said, lifting her visor to look up at the birds. “They share information all the time. Haven’t you heard the legends about the experiments? Come on, we need to hurry up.”
“Wait,” Starl said. He stood in front of the fountain and peered up at the single gray parrot looking down at him. “Where’s Crash?” he called.
The parrot bobbed its head and showed him one yellow eye and then the other. It looked clearly pleased. “Crash is fine!” it squawked. “Crash is fine!”
“You tell Crash hello for me,” Starl said.
“Get Crash!” the bird called.
Starl hooked his thumbs in his belt. “How am I going to do that?”
“You can! You can! Ngo-ba!”
The crows seemed to have had enough of their conversation. As one, they launched from the stone branches like a black cloud behind the parrot and flapped out over the bazaar past Starl. He craned his head, turning to watch them fly toward the opposite wall.
“You ever wonder if they miss real sky?” he asked.
“They’ve never known anything different,” Fug said.
“Yeah, but they keep getting smarter and smarter. We mess with them, make them more like us. I bet somewhere in there they know living in a tin can like Cruithne is wrong, just like we do.”
“I like it here,” Zanda said.
Fug seemed to remember something she’d said earlier. “Why are you here?” she barked at Zanda. She turned to Starl. “I said he wasn’t part of this.”
“He was there at the meeting,” Starl said. “You saw him. You nodded along that Zanda was part of this.”
Fug squinted at him. “I must have been distracted. He’s out. I don’t want him here.”
“You said we’re running interference,” Starl said. “You think I can do that alone? It takes more than one person to keep an eye on your back. One of us is going to have to watch you while the other watches out for Slarva or his people or whoever. The air changes in there, I can’t trust that one of us will catch it.”
Fug shook her head. “You’re talking, Starl. But it’s just a vacuous collection of words.”
Zan
da opened his mouth to jump in but Starl shushed him.
“How close do you need to get to the platform?” Starl asked, forging ahead.
Fug stared at him, glanced at Zanda, then shook her head in disgust. “As close as possible,” she said, apparently giving in on Zanda’s participation. “People, augments, gadgets – all of it can interfere with my system.”
“So that’s it. You need both of us. If we were hiding against the far wall, we might get away with it. But we’re going to get in close, and you need eyes on all sides.”
“If he tries to figure out what I’m doing, if I see him even glance my way while I’m working, we’re done. You got me, Starl? You trust your boy enough not to sell you out? I heard you don’t have a place to live anymore. Mama Chala booted your ass out.”
Starl shot Zanda a sour look. “You sell me out?” he said.
Zanda shrugged. “Wasn’t me.”
“You’ve gone from desperate to fucked,” Fug said, chuckling as if she’d made a joke. “This job is all you’ve got, right? You trust Zanda not to screw it up for you?”
Starl pursed his lips. “Zanda? What do you have to say about any of this?”
“I got you, Ngoba. I’ll keep my eyes on everybody but our little green friend here.”
“I’m not your friend,” Fug said.
“Of course not,” Starl said. “So we going in?”
Fug glanced across the bazaar to the far edge where the doors to the Hangar stood. The way was still clear. Crowds wouldn’t gather for another hour.
“The players should be out and they should have the console and controllers up for viewing,” Fug said. “I’m going to walk up and talk to the players, try and get close to the system so nobody notices. I’ll be doing that for about fifteen minutes. You hang back. Once I’m done, you’ll know because I’ll go around the side of the platform like I’m getting a good place to watch. That’s when you come up beside me and keep an eye out, you got me? I don’t want any security types sliding up to ask me what I’m doing.”