To See the Sun

by Kelly Jensen

  The best mining for the rarest minerals lay below the green zone.

  Cycling his HUD, Bram looked for the last ping he’d had on the new mineral deposit and prepared to backtrack along the ledge. The seam might have turned into the rock, up (in his dreams), or down (most likely scenario). He had forty minutes to confirm his suspicions, one way or another, before he had to start up. Longer if he cut into the filter time reserved for the climb up to the terraces.

  As he stepped back along the ledge, his thoughts wandered around what he could accomplish if he had an extra source of income. He could carve out another terrace, expanding his farm. He could buy a new environment suit, or the parts to upgrade this one and the junker he kept as a spare. The one he should be using for parts. He could add a couple of rooms to his living quarters—not that he needed them. Not right now.

  But if he ever started a family . . .

  Snorting, Bram shoved that thought aside. He’d have to meet someone first, and folks weren’t exactly lining up to live halfway down a trench on a half-terraformed planet with a former miner turned farmer who wrote poetry in his spare time.

  When nothing needed fixing. So, about once a year.

  And it all sucked. Because, really, what did he have to write about?

  In response, his nose twitched and sweat rolled down the back of his neck. Bram clenched his fingers in his glove. “Less dreaming, more suit fixing.”

  A thin light bloomed on the left corner of his HUD. Bram chinned the display, enlarging the map, and grinned. There. The seam did branch. Down, not up or back, but what was another few meters of poison atmosphere? After tucking away the device, he climbed over to the point where the seam curved downward and looked for handholds in the rock.

  The ledge he stood on tapered to a point a meter or two distant, but there might be another one just below it. Ledges sometimes ran along the side of a crevasse for a hundred kilometers or so, forming highways of a sort. The green-zone terraces were wide ledges, grouped together. The deeper into the crevasse, the narrower the ledges became.

  Bram leaned out and aimed his helmet light down the wall. Through his audio pickup, he could hear grit shifting under his boot soles as he glanced over his shoulder. His left boot slipped, and he grabbed at a small outcropping, pulling himself back upright.

  Not content with merely being poisonous, the mists also left a greasy residue on everything they touched.

  There was another ledge, more than a short drop down. He’d need to come back with better climbing equipment, unless . . . Maybe the other ledge wandered up to meet this one? It’d be a couple of days before he could make another trip down if he didn’t check now.

  Bram moved carefully along his ledge until only the toes of his boots clung to a narrow sill. He balanced by digging his gloved fingers into regular holes in the rock.

  If only he’d thought to bring an anchor or two.

  “We’re just looking today, right?”

  His breath was hot and unpleasant inside his helmet. Bram chinned the display and dug the ultrasonic device out of his thigh pocket. Might as well see if the seam passed by here before angling downward.

  He pressed it to the rock and thumbed the switch. His breath hitched as the glow of his find filled the display, now occupying the entire lower left-hand corner of the map. Jumping up and down on a narrow ledge would be stupid, so the giddy sensation that had been crawling around his gut since he found the seam would have to suffice, as far as celebrations went, until he got back to his terrace. Or until he identified the mineral. He hoped it wouldn’t be useless, but it could be mundane.

  Pulling the device from the rock, Bram shoved it toward his pocket and missed. He reached for it, cursing as the tool bounced off his fingers and tumbled into the swirling mist below. Bram swung his arm back up, and one foot slid from the ledge, his heavy boot threatening to drag him out over the crevasse. He scrabbled at the rock in front of him, searching for hand holds, and stuck one gloved finger into a hole just as his dangling weight pulled his other hand free.

  His left foot kicked into the mist. His right boot slid off the ledge.

  Bram had half a second to look up at the finger he’d managed to wedge into the rock, less than a quarter of a second to wonder if it was going to hurt when the weight of his body tore it loose, about an eighth of a second to imagine leaving the finger behind and the pain of amputation, before he was falling into the dark, an uncharacteristic yell echoing from his helmet pickups.

  He didn’t fall far. The ledge below his was wider than it had appeared, and Bram landed heavily enough to force air from his lungs. His helmet collided with the wall behind him, and one of his legs tried to measure the distance between the not-really-that-wide shelf and whatever lay below it.

  Purple and green spots danced across his display—his vision dimming and brightening as he struggled to breathe. If he passed out, his body would remember that most basic function, right? Bram blinked again, multiple times, and listened for the alarm signaling a suit breach. For several long seconds he heard nothing but a ringing behind his ears and the panicked thrum of his blood.

  His finger hurt.

  That probably meant it was still attached.

  His vision continued to fluctuate. Thoughts careened around his skull, leaving lightning imprints—words, images, memories. A vision of wide green terraces climbing the side of each crevasse until they basked beneath an atmosphere designed to tame the sun’s radiation. Blue skies. Trees. Community. A family.

  You are such a dumb fuck. Thirty years of experience mining in adverse conditions and here he was possibly venting precious oxygen into a cloud of poisonous gas while lying broken and bleeding on a ledge well below the green zone of a barely habitable planet.

  The ringing in his ears subsided into a single insistent beep. Bram blinked, drew in a painful and shuddering breath, and dropped his chin to access his HUD. His suit had a tear on the back of his hip. Because he was lying on it, he hadn’t vented an appreciable amount of air. How much poison mist would creep in when he moved to repair it?

  Okay, okay. Think fast. He had a patch in a thigh pocket. Experimentally, Bram lifted one arm, then the other. Both his gloves were intact, but the finger that had held his weight for those stupid seconds felt as though it had torn loose from his knuckle. His right hand throbbed. Left hand, then.

  He reached across his body and flipped open the appropriate pocket. Extracted the patch and squeezed the corner to activate the sealant.

  “One, two, three . . .” He rolled off his hip, reached back, and slapped the patch over the breach.

  The alarm fell silent. Bram lay back and breathed for a moment or two while his filter unit struggled to account for the small rip. Then he sat and looked for a way up. His helmet light glinted off something on the ledge next to him: the ultrasonic device. Dried sweat pulled his skin taut as Bram grinned. “Well, how ’bout that.”

  He thumbed the switch and put the device to the rock next to him. His helmet display lit up from end to end. He’d found it, the end of the seam, and it was big.

  Big, beautiful, and all his.

  Zhemosen

  The closed shutter bowed beneath the weight of Gael’s fist. “I know you’re in there. C’mon, Price. Open up. I need your help.”

  As the muted sounds of the undercity rolled in to cover his ragged breathing, a sense of finality settled heavily across Gael’s shoulders. Tracing his error back to the beginning was pointless. His current troubles hadn’t started with him trying to sell the gun, or failing to plan the job better. Nor had they begun with him taking a position with the Trass family, and not keeping a closer eye on his brother. He couldn’t blame Loic, either. Blaming a dead person was the coward’s way out.

  He just didn’t know how to make a good decision—putting aside the fact he rarely had a lot of time to consider his choices.

  Gael raised his hand for another knock, the movement as tight as a last gasp, and fell forward as the shutter rose.
Two gloved hands grabbed his arm and dragged him into hot, close twilight, and the shutter banged down behind him, catching the bag on his shoulder and knocking him to the ground.

  He yelled as his knees hit cement, and the gun parts clanked as they dug into his back.

  “Shush!” a voice hissed in his ear.

  “Stuck.” In more ways than one.

  His rescuer pulled him forward, out from under the shutter, and an echoing clang sealed the darkness. Shaking the hand from his shoulder, Gael got to his feet and reached blindly into the gloom. A light snapped on, the sudden brightness a painful flare against his retinas. Hissing, Gael squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Seriously, Gael, if you can’t keep it down, I’m going to have to knock you over the head and shove your body into the sewer.”

  “Fuck you, Price.”

  “That’s the thanks I get?”

  Gael cracked one eye open. “For not opening your door? Yeah.”

  Price put his hands on his hips. Light flashed off the connective fibers of his biofeedback gloves. He’d obviously been working. Fixing something cybernetic. Price was always fixing and tinkering, and hated to be interrupted, even by paying customers.

  “Wait!” Gael raised his own hands in an effort to ward off the incoming rant. “I’m sorry, okay? Thank you for opening your door.”

  Deflating slowly, his expression indicating he’d rather yell, Price sighed. “C’mon. I was about to put the kettle on.”

  Gael’s throat ached drily at the thought of tea. Still blinking, he followed as Price wove a path through the cluttered shelves of his store. Items poked out here and there, the end of a crossbow, a single oar—useful in the sewers maybe, as the coast was over two hundred kilometers away—a bolt of cloth that reeked of sweat and smoke, jumbles of wire, some spooled, some hopelessly tangled, the corners of stacked tablets and handheld task panes, pots, pans. If it existed, a part of it was likely as not stored somewhere in Price’s store. Actually, no. If it existed and had been used a time or three hundred, Price had it on his shelves—and he’d charge quadruple its worth to let you use it again. More than that if he’d “fixed” it.

  “I probably just killed my business by letting you inside,” Price muttered as he entered a small, cramped kitchen. He pulled off his gloves, exposing chubby pink hands, lifted the kettle, shook it, and put it back down again. The kettle obediently started hissing. “Why are you here?”

  “You’re the only one who opened the door.”

  “You’re all over ShopNet, Gael. What under the burning sun did you do?”

  Glancing behind him, Gael located the corner of a chair otherwise piled high with stuff. He swung the bag from his shoulder, letting it land on the floor with a clatter, and sat. “It’s what I didn’t do. Or maybe it’s what people think I did. Could even be what I did after. Then there was the girl.”

  “As usual, you’re making no sense whatsoever.”

  “Trass gave me a job to do. It was supposed to be a one-off thing to”—Gael formed quotes with his fingers—“leverage my position with the family.”

  “So, to pay off another of your brother’s debts.”

  Gael was too tired and numb to rise to the bait. He settled a hand over his tortured gut and pressed inward. “I fucked it up.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “I know where the sewer access is, Price.”

  Price crossed his arms over his wide torso. “You might be able to put that gun together in time to kill me, if I sat here and watched. But it’d all end with you not having the stomach to cut me up into enough pieces to feed to the sewer rats.”

  A bang echoed through the front of the shop, causing both of them jump. Price frowned. When Gael made to get up, Price gestured him to stay where he was, and grumbled his way back into the shop. A few moments later, the front shutter rattled and banged again.

  Price cursed as he returned to the kitchen, pausing only to flick off the shop lights. “Some other swine thinking I was open. Okay, where were we?”

  Gael swallowed, and the sides of his throat stuck together. “That tea ready yet? And how did you know I had a gun in this bag?”

  Price tapped his head. He had a small, silver disk embedded in his temple. “Merch chatter.”

  “Right.” Gael should never have tried to sell the damn thing. “I’m an idiot.”

  Price lifted the kettle and shook it again. When he set it down, it started chugging. “We could talk about that, or we could talk about why you’re here.”

  Or they could talk about why Price insisted on using a kettle when beverage dispensers cost less to run than getting fresh water and actual leaves. Guy was permanently jacked in to the undercity network and didn’t balk at linking directly to devices through biofeedback gloves. Previous discussions on the topic usually ended with Price going on about parts of the tea leaf and the temperature of water. None of it made sense, so Gael had stopped asking, and let Price make tea the way he wanted to.

  Price pulled two cups from hooks behind a shelf and started spooning precious leaves into a diffuser.

  Gael nudged the bag with his shoe. “I need you to buy this gun from me. I don’t care what it’s worth, I just need enough credits to get to District Twenty-Five.”

  “You can walk to D25.”

  Not easily, even if he was more used to parting with what the keepers of illicit gates wanted than that girl might have been.

  “What you’re asking for is enough credits to get out of the city,” Price continued.

  Gael shrugged.

  “Okay, first of all, I’m not touching that gun. Having you in my shop is bad for business. Buying stolen Trass property?” Price made a cutting motion in front of his throat. “Second of all, you have nothing worth a ticket out of Zhemosen.”

  While Gael stewed on that, the kettle belched a fitful cloud of steam. Picking it up, Price glanced over at him. “You didn’t use the gun, did you?”

  Gael thought about lying. Prepared, even, to shrug and let Price figure it out. Then he shook his head and buried his face in his hands.

  “Ah, Gael.”

  Crying wouldn’t improve his situation. It never had. Gael sucked back the urge and buried it deep. He needed to think clearly. More clearly than he ever had in his life. He also needed to put himself first, which hurt in a way he couldn’t quite grasp yet.

  Loic.

  On top of all of that, he had to stop showing weakness to Price. It was one thing to silently acknowledge that Price knew he was a fuckup. Quite another to share that opinion out loud.

  “Rufus is going to be looking for you.” Rufus being Julius’s nephew and the Trass family enforcer. It’d been Rufus’s job to take care of the bodyguard. Probably because it would have been messier than a shot across an alleyway.

  “I had my finger on the trigger,” Gael said. “Then the target was dead.”

  The dim lighting in the shop cast a lazy shadow over Price’s surprise. “So, you did do it?”

  Gael shook his head for about the fiftieth time that day. “No, someone else did it just as I was lining up the shot.”

  “Not good.”

  “Could be good? I mean, if Rufus hasn’t caught up with me yet, they might think I actually did it.”

  “And then tried to sell the gun you were supposed to dispose of.”

  “So I could simply be guilty of idiocy.”

  “Trass will hurt you for that.”

  Gael’s shoulders pinched together. He knew how Julius would hurt him. “I can’t do this anymore, Price. It’s not just what’s waiting for me back at Trass Tower.” That sense of finality was back, heavier than before. “I don’t want to be a killer. And I’m no good at intimidation.”

  Too small, too delicately featured. Besides, that had always been Loic’s line of work.

  Thinking about his brother and how he’d been used, how they’d both been played, threatened to send Gael looking for the sewers on his own. He wasn’t brave enough for that, though. Th
e undercity might be dark, but it wasn’t close and cramped and full of rats and the detritus of a million illegal activities.

  Not quite.

  “I’m not smart enough to be one of his inside guys,” he continued, rubbing his face. “And I threw up for three days when he sent me on a cleanup job.”

  “Is that what that stink is?”

  Gael glanced at his shoes. “The only thing I’m good for is running shit back and forth, and I grew out of that fifteen years ago.”

  “What about . . .?” Price arched both eyebrows. “You’re pretty enough.”

  “Apparently not smiling upsets the clients.”

  “So smoke some weed beforehand.”

  “Do you really think I’ll be pretty enough after this?”

  “He’ll mark you where it doesn’t show.”

  Ignoring that, “This was probably my last chance to prove my usefulness. With no other way to pay down what I owe the family, Trass will own me.”

  Exhaling, Price distributed the tea mugs and perched one ample buttock on the corner of another chair. Somehow it didn’t tip over. “Okay. How about an off-planet indenture?”

  Ten years of his life given to a corporation that might sign him off with enough credits to starve slowly rather than quickly while he waited for another indenture. It didn’t always go like that, but Gael had heard plenty of stories, and he didn’t have time to find a good contract. He’d have to take what he could get, and what he could get might be worse than what he already had, hard as that was to believe. He’d heard those stories too.

  Some indentures were little more than legal slavery.

  “Know, offhand, of any recruiters on Zhemosen offering contracts that will pay, in food as well as credits, for work that won’t kill me before the expiration date?”

  Price tilted his head. “Actually, yeah, I might.”

  Snorting, Gael lifted his mug for an experimental sip. Price was still looking at him. Thoughtfully. Not good.