by Stephen Hunt
Zeno grabbed Lana too as she tried to rise up and swing for the rival skipper, reminding her that his android strength went far beyond human. On the other side of the bar, Pitor’s crew had jumped out of their chairs, ready to wade in and make this a proper barroom brawl. ‘Don’t do it, girl,’ whispered Zeno. ‘Of all the jams we’ve escaped together, dumping chuckles here was by far the closest scrape.’
‘You think that blue chip alliance money is enough to buy me?’ said Lana, raising her voice loud enough for every spacer in the bar to hear. ‘You and Hyperfast can jump to hell together. There’s not enough credit in Mitsubishi Bank to buy what you and your friends want.’
‘Never make a good decision when you can make a bad one,’ sighed Pitor. He bowed slightly towards her. ‘Some things never change. Well then, we shall see what the passage of time brings. Nothing good, I fear.’
‘Every bit the cad,’ said Skrat, watching the rival skipper cross back to his table on the opposite side of the bar.
‘You nearly married him?’ said Calder, disbelievingly.
‘Stow that attitude, Mister Calder,’ snarled Lana. ‘I seem to recall you were engaged to a noblewoman who ended up deposing you, annexing your country and trying to have you boiled in a tar bath. Compared to that bitch, Pitor Skeeg could nearly be mistaken for stand-up crew.’
‘Shit, only in a bad light,’ said Zeno. ‘I did warn you…’
Lana slumped back into her seat. ‘I ever get to be as old as you, maybe I’ll be so wise after the event.’
‘I’m still making mistakes,’ said Zeno, ‘just new ones, is all.’
Lana gazed morosely at her empty drink. Seven ships, now? Shit, she’d do a deal with the devil if it meant showing Hyperfast that she still had what it takes. Lana wouldn’t let the Gravity Rose go down, not with that little shit waiting on the sidelines to pick up the keys. Nobody could spoil the taste of a Rum Swizzle like Pitor Skeeg. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here, load up those supplies and roll out the red carpet for DSD’s tame academic.’
The void wouldn’t be half as cold as the atmosphere in this place.
***
Pitor Skeeg waited until the crew of the Gravity Rose had left the bar, then he walked up to the counter in the centre and nodded towards the owner, Chacon. She frowned at him, but came over, all the same, checking no staff or other customers were in earshot.
‘Give it up,’ he ordered.
‘I don’t like this,’ she complained.
‘Then you shouldn’t have sold your bar to Hyperfast,’ said Pitor. ‘But don’t worry, if you possess a few residual scruples, just tell yourself it’s an investment in your future. With the life extension treatments you are accepting from the company, it could prove a very long life. Providing for yourself should be considered a necessity, not a luxury.’
She grimaced, but slipped her hand under the counter, activating the data transfer to his phone all the same. He lifted his device up as it confirmed successful receipt of her download.
‘How the hell do you do it?’ she asked. ‘Beat a privacy field?’
‘The bugs installed inside the tables are supplied directly to Hyperfast by the triple alliance intelligence service. The very latest technology. The alliance desire for the Edge to be tamed as much as the company does. A little soft money and aid spread around the border systems does wonders. Our surveillance tech is nothing that mere tramp captains bumping along the bottom of the Edge can be expected to detect.’ Pitor replayed everything that Lana’s crew had discussed from the moment they had first sat down. He couldn’t decrypt her little transmission to the ship, but no matter. He had almost everything he needed to derail Lana, and a little judicial and focused snooping would provide all the rest. ‘So,’ he hummed to himself. ‘Dollar-sign Dillard is still willing to commission free traders? Let us see if he is prepared to do so after his little Lana has lost her cargo. That pickled schemer’s costs of doing business are about to rise substantially higher than he can afford.’
‘You’re stealing routes and clients from everyone who comes in here,’ said Chacon, ruefully. ‘Just how much is going to be enough for you?’
‘The universe is theoretically infinite,’ smiled Pitor Skeeg. And so, naturally, were the limits of his ambition. Skeeg nodded towards the menu animation scrolling across the mirror behind her counter. ‘Talking of which, bundle more free meals with the drinks. There should be extra custom in the bar, it is too quiet here.’
Chacon shook her head, sadly. ‘Greedy… crews are going to get suspicious.’
‘Everyone needs to eat, my dear.’ Especially the company. They were perpetually hungry. The perfect marriage, really. It almost made up for losing Lana and the Gravity Rose. But that was the thing about greatness… it always demanded sacrifices. The trick was to make sure everyone else made most of them for you.
***
Calder watched Zeno and the legion of robots he was commanding swarm over the piled cargo. The Gravity Rose had moved from her original mooring to dock alongside the freight zone DSD rented; after their ship had mated with the side of the station, a vast cargo chamber opened along the hull for Zeno’s caterpillar-tracked robots to take freight on board. Oblong steel containers were still arriving on the station’s rail system, the open space echoing with the sound of reversing warnings and flashing with rotating lights. Each cargo handling robot was the size of a house, fork-lift arms picking up containers two at a time, piling them on platforms at the droid’s back, and when it had a full load, trundling away into the depths of the ship. Smaller robots were doing the checking, supervised by Zeno – and more nominally by Calder. Why do I get the feeling the chief just wants me out from under his feet while we’re in dock? In truth, there wasn’t much to do in the engine room at the moment. And Calder needed to get rotated through every position on board the ship, if he was going to properly understand its workings. He was looking forward to the time when he’d be stationed on the bridge, alongside Lana Fiveworlds. She had shown remarkably bad taste in her previous choice of beau, but she had a point. Calder wasn’t in any position to judge, given that the treacherous last object of his affections had sold him out and tried to have him executed before he been sent into exile among the stars. Maybe making poor choices in matters if the heart was something they shared. Give me a chance, captain, because you’re about to trade up.
Zeno pointed to a train sliding in on the rails carrying a fresh batch of containers. ‘Those are some of the replacement components for the ship the skipper’s brought using Dollar-sign’s deposit money. We’ll check them next. I don’t want to install a single part that hasn’t been scanned.’
Calder looked where he was pointing. ‘But the crates have come from the system’s ship yard, not DSD?’
‘And if DSD wanted to sneak something on board the ship, that would be the way he’d do it. Bribe some mope to slip contraband inside an engine part.’
Zeno bent down to examine the readout on a robot he had wired into a twenty foot-long ceramic tube. Calder looked over his shoulder. Its contents were listed as disassembler nano – a dark inactive gloop that when fired into life would tunnel through rock like a laser knife through cheese. Calder had done enough sim cop shows to know that this was one part of the cargo that warranted heavy checking. The molecular level machines could be programmed to do almost anything, become almost anything. If DSD was planning something unsubtle, the programming instructions for this nanotechnology was where they would find it.
‘Find something suspicious?’ asked Calder.
‘Nope. Exactly what it says on the tin, a mining virus. Powerful enough to level a mountain range. To go along with all the jungle clearance equipment, diggers, excavation tools, food packs and water purification gear.’
‘So this is a stand-up job?’
‘Well, if you were setting up a development company, this is the gear you’d buy off the shelf.’
‘That’s a good thing, right?’ asked Calder.
&nb
sp; ‘Kid, I was alive when mankind made its first extra-solar landing on Alpha Centauri. I was watching on TV when mankind establish first contact with a kaggen ship. And in all that time, across all the centuries, I haven’t once seen someone like DSD change his spots. If Lana wants to believe a crook like Dollar-sign is moving into honest endeavours, then it’s because she needs to believe. Because our future is at stake. Me, I’ll just keep checking crates until I find the hidden weaponized plague that carries a death sentence for us on four out of five worlds inside the Edge.’
A small robot swung up to Zeno, running across the deck like a unicycle on a single ball. He reached down and tapped it affectionately, listening to the wireless burst of data being transmitted. ‘There we go,’ said the android. ‘That’s what I was hoping for.’
‘You’ve discovered a crate of nukes?’
‘Nope, your most noble highness. I’ve scored me a capsule with an atmospheric sample from the world we’re travelling to. The professor is shipping it back; along with the full spectral analysis she’s paid a very exclusive laboratory in the alliance to run for her. Extra analysis to confirm her in-situ findings.’
‘Ah,’ said Calder. That was a useful discovery, indeed. It wasn’t just criminals who left DNA prints, worlds did too, as long as they had been visited by a survey ship, however briefly.
‘I’m going to make a call to a contact of mine in the local colonial office,’ said Zeno. ‘See if we can’t find a little more about this Abracadabra before we turn up in orbit.’
‘What about the professor?’ said Calder. ‘She’s meant to be arriving soon. And there’s still the delivery from the shipyard…’
The android waved away Calder’s concerns as he hitched a lift on the back of a passing cargo droid. ‘That’s why they pay you the big bucks, your highness.’ He disappeared among the waiting piles of freight.
Calder snorted. The crew of the ship might have saved his life, but if he had collected a pay cheque yet, he must have missed it. The nobleman felt a brief pang of regret, of pure homesickness. This was beginning to feel like his real life now. His world, Hesperus, might have been an icy, unforgiving environment. But it had still been home. Calder had forgotten how peculiar feeling warm all the time was. Standing on ground where the wind didn’t hurry along ice particles in a fast-moving mist hugging the land. Where trees that lined the station’s promenades didn’t resemble lines of ice-covered trolls, bowed down by the weight of snow. You’re a fool, Calder Durk. You were being hunted, friendless and familyless with the death mark on your head. You can’t regret leaving, any more than you can regret living. For to stay would have been to die. You owe Lana Fiveworlds your life. And perhaps a little more than that too, after Calder had proved himself to her. It was the normal course of events back home for a noblewoman to assign her suitor a number of difficult tasks to complete for him to demonstrate his worthiness. Of course, it was the political fallout of Calder’s attempt to prove his worth on Hesperus that had seen him fleeing largely friendless across the snowy wastes, with almost every assassin and soldier’s blade in the land turned against him. Still, what are the chances of something like that happening again?
When the professor eventually turned up, an automated pod of a taxi carried the woman into the cargo area, mirrored gull-wing doors lifting to reveal her legs swinging out. She didn’t look much like Calder’s idea of what a dusty academic should resemble. Six foot-tall, dark auburn hair secured by an ivory Alice band, a bright green trouser suit impeccably tailored to her lithe frame. Her pretty pale face might have appeared the same age as Calder’s on the surface, but the exiled nobleman noticed her snow-white fingernails – not the result of cosmetics, but repeated deep age re-sets. Professor Alison Sebba was an alliance patrician, all right, and the woman could have been pushing five hundred years old for all that Calder knew.
‘Professor Sebba?’
‘I am. And you must be Calder Durk,’ she smiled, an energetic voice, her aristocratic accent bubbling over with enthusiasm. ‘Don’t look so surprised. Mister Dillard sent me everything he had on the ship and crew. With only six of you on board, it made for a short read. Your file was the thinnest by far, but then Hesperus has been off the grid for a very long time.’
Calder wasn’t sure he enjoyed being the focus of study of this venerable intelligence. There was something about those too-young blue eyes, depths hidden and dangerous, and starkly at odds with her cheerful openness and perfect white smile. I must be imagining it. After being casually betrayed by the beautiful princess Calder had been betrothed to back home, he didn’t find it easy to trust anyone, especially not women.
‘It’s a rare thing to meet someone who’s even heard of my home world.’
‘I used to be an archaeologist,’ said Sebba. ‘Until the alliance develops functional time travel, collapsed civilizations are as near as we can get to seeing how pre-machine age societies work.’
‘You used to dig up old bones?’
‘Rarely. Mostly what I dug up were obsolete file formats in the datasphere. My specialism was marketing archaeology. Studying ancient brands and working out why some still prosper and have lodged deeply in our current human consciousness, while others just wither and die. Why you can still buy a can of Pepsi from a vending machine on the station, while nobody drinks Coke, for instance, when the converse was more frequently the expected result.’
‘Because the taste of coal dust is disgusting?’ The professor had a natural prettiness, soft lines and extended eyelashes, a long distance removed from the obviously artificial perfection Calder had noted in many of the station’s females. It was easy to warm to her open, engaging manner.
Sebba laughed. ‘You see, you make my point for me. You would be the perfect test example for me. Unexposed to a marketing messages for the majority of your life.’
‘There were priests on my world,’ said Calder. ‘They had a message. Worship at our altar or burn in a tar bath.’
‘Ah yes, religion, the earliest meme. You are quite correct, of course. I see I shall have to study you more closely, Mister Durk. You are a wonderful breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale universe.’ She pointed towards the gaping hold of the Gravity Rose. Her relatively small exploration ship was visible loaded on one of the shuttle rails. ‘Would you be able to give me a tour of your vessel?’
Calder indicated the crates of supplies being shifted by Zeno’s robots, other freight still being opened and searched. ‘Later, perhaps.’
‘Of course. I have inspected your ship and crew’s bona fides, it is only fair to expect a little of the same in reverse.’
‘Well, you are working for Dollar-sign Dillard…’
‘Working with him. Much the same as yourself and your crew, I suspect. If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know. My mining team is still on Abracadabra and they’re going to be running low on supplies by the time I return.’
‘We’ll be there in good time, professor.’ Of course, that’s a fairly hollow reassurance until you give us the world’s coordinates.
She reached out and touched his shoulder. ‘Then I shall leave you to give the supplies a very thorough going over. Considering the reputation of our mutual patron, perhaps we will both need to “satisfy” ourselves of our intentions later?’
Calder instructed one on the robots to guide the professor to the cabin reserved for her and watched her board the ship, opening a lock inside the hold that led to the ship’s internal transport system. She had proved a lot more interesting than he had expected.
Even if Calder’s attention hadn’t been focused on her willowy figure, it’s doubtful if he ever would have noticed the addition of an extra robot joining the gang of hundreds labouring inside the station’s cargo chamber. Clambering on top of one of the containers moving toward the Gravity Rose; drilling a hole large enough for a metal tentacle to slip through, whipping around inside. Searching for the perfect place to conceal the very expensive and advanced tracking device that wa
s the highest piece of technological art alliance intelligence manufactured for its co-conspirators… including corporate accomplices such as Pitor Skeeg and the Hyperfast Group.
***
Zeno walked into the laundry. There was a single member of staff slouched behind the desk, the same old woman as the last time he had visited. She showed no signs of recognizing him, though, as distinctive as the robot’s golden skin must be to her eyes.
‘I need to use your terminal out back,’ said Zeno.
‘Fuck you,’ said the dour-faced woman.
‘I’ve only got twenty-three dollars left on my phone,’ said Zeno. ‘And it’s not enough to call my uncle.’
‘My terminal is broken.’
‘You’re in luck. I’m carrying the spare parts to fix it,’ said Zeno.
She grunted and raised the counter, without further complaint or conversation. Zeno had rattled through the same series of pass phrases on his last visit, too. He went through a doorway, dozens of specialised cleaning robots ignoring his presence, so narrowly designed that all they could perceive were the clothes they were steaming and pressing and ironing. The laundry’s terminal was built into a wall in a little office beyond the main washing chamber, old and rickety and all camouflage, right down to the little faded sheets of paper taped to it (including the passwords into its fake top-level interface). Zeno passed a minute of electronic challenge and counter challenge to get through the security protocols, and then a polymer-thin screen extruded itself from the floor, sealing Zeno off the world outside. Just him and the terminal. After the secure connection was established, Zeno pulsed across the data he had on Abracadabra’s atmospheric sample, and then settled down to wait. It took a while for the transfer to be acknowledged. That was to be expected. Zeno’s data packets were passing along a hideously expensive network of hyperspace communications relays. There was another delay for the sample to be matched against survey data from hundreds of worlds and nations in the Edge, as well as everything the alliance had from its many deep space missions. If there was an answer recorded somewhere within humanity’s almost limitless bulk of knowledge, then he would be able to find it. A silhouette formed on the screen, a male voice sounding from the terminal’s speakers, its tenor faintly distorted by the tachyon signal bouncing through an impossibly expensive relay of wormholes and comms satellites.