by Mel Keegan
“Till you get back to Borushek, then, my best to you and Neil.”
The screen darkened, and Marin sagged back against Travers, grateful for the arms around him, the kiss pressed to his temple. For some time they were silent. There was nothing to say – too much to say. Mark was right, the decisions were too difficult, too complex, for them to even make sense at once.
At last Marin stirred, turned into Travers’s embrace and hunted for a kiss which Neil was pleased to give him. Shapiro’s message was still waiting, but Marin could not look at it, not yet. At the moment, Vaurien and Jazinsky would be looking at their own messages, and the same sinking sensations would be in every belly.
Before either he or Travers could find more than a whispered oath the AI said quietly, “Captain Rodman requests the presence of her passengers for the surface of Celeste. The Hong Lung is on standby.”
Reluctant, angry with himself for the ambivalence, Marin wrenched up to his feet and dragged both hands through his hair, clenched his fingers there, as if he would physically drag coherent thought out of his brain. Travers stood, and caught him again. “Let it be,” he said simply. “One thing at a time. Henri Belczak and the Shanghai veterans first. Then … we talk about his.”
“If there’s anything to talk about.” Marin touched Neil’s face lightly and then slid open the closet and, with a sigh, lifted out the too-familiar weapons case.
Sidearms, machine pistols, magazines, powerpacks, palmguns and needle guns which should be invisible to scanning, all were laid out in orderly rows, nested in gray foam. Without comment, he and Travers pulled on the shoulder harness and slid the weapons away.
At the open door, Travers turned back for a moment and frowned at the threedee. Marin knew he was thinking about Shapiro’s message, and he propelled Travers before him as he left the cabin. “Later. You said it yourself. One thing at a time. Right?”
“Right,” Travers agreed in a tone as grim as his expression, and headed aft to the nearest service elevator for the ride back to the deck among the machine shops, where the Hong Lung had docked on.
Chapter Five
Like a jewel cast up on the side of a sand dune, the mansion winked in the late morning sun glare as the Hong Lung dropped in out of the east. The gleaming array of dishes and pylons that ringed the property would not have raised an eyebrow if they had appeared on the spine of a warship or science vessel, but they seemed odd, attached to a mansion which would been coveted in the brightlights sectors of Elstrom City, Velcastra.
Travers recognized the sensor and comm arrays lifted from a Fleet cruiser, a ship like Harrison Shapiro’s Mercury. How long was it since a Fleet warship had been lost in the Drift? The thought inspired memories of the Intrepid, and an involuntary shiver rushed through him.
Inside the perimeter of spines and dishes, the house sprawled north and south, vast even by comparison with Mark’s home on Saraine. The roof was flat, and gardens grew in great terracotta troughs; pale stucco walls shriveled the irises, and scores of windows reflected a landscape of such desolation, the last such place Travers had seen was the highlands of El Khouri, where an imbecile from Fleet took Dario Sherratt’s work and used it destroy the biosphere of a continent.
The cockpit was lit only by instrument lights. The viewports dimmed in the sudden glare, and Travers took a moment to glance at Hubler’s instruments as Roark took the Lung down to the landing paddock, rotated it into the space between several smaller ships, and the Aragos began to hammer. Rodman’s ship was by no means small, but its age was against it. It had logged too many hours in e-space, ridden out too many rough landings, hauled too many cargoes on the edge of its capacity. The hull was sound enough, the drives were good enough, but Travers would have assigned the old hull to dock duties, or shorthauls between worlds in a system without hazards.
The work on offer out here, where Freespace rubbed shoulders with Rabelais Space, was rougher than Asako Rodman wanted to contemplate without the Harlequin, and Travers suspected she was being manipulated. Belczak had a ship he wanted to unload for cash; Rodman needed work, but the high-risk jobs which would take her and Hubler into Hellgate were infuriatingly out of the question. The age-old mechanics of supply and demand.
And Rodman knew she was being maneuvered. The look on her face would have soured milk as she watched the mansion come up out of the tan-beige deserts of Celeste, with its porcupine spines of comm arrays and its vast, mirror windows. She hated Belczak with a passion, Travers saw, and he did not underestimate her judgment. Hubler was little less sour as he surveyed the mansion, and he had only been out here a matter of weeks, since resigning his commission after the fight at Ulrand.
Celeste was a bad place to be. Its name was a joke, for no hint of green or blue alleviated the landscape as far as any horizon. Travers leaned closer to the instruments, to see the deep-scan results. The water was fifty meters down, an aquifer the size of an inland sea. The colony pumped off it in scores of places to maintain four settlements – and the mines.
In this part of the planet they were mining rutile sands. Titanium. Elsewhere, Celeste yielded bauxite and, in tiny amounts, rhodium, palladium, iridium, and the rare earths – actinium, thorium, intensely dangerous to handle, even for drones. Human labor belonged nowhere in the vicinity, but Travers suspected these Freespacers had no such concerns.
With a heavy impact through the whole frame, the Hong Lung settled. The Aragos shut off a moment later, and only in the following calm did Travers realise how much vibration they had kicked up. Before he could say anything Rodman muttered, “Yeah, tell me about it. The repulsion’s out of alignment, she needs fixing. Which means a week in dock, and I don’t have the time or the cash.”
She was shutting down systems as she spoke, and the cockpit lights came up to a subtle blue. Hubler was listening to the combug in his right ear, and a moment later said tersely, “Yeah, all right, suit yourself. We’ll wait for you.” He tossed the bug on the workspace at his elbow and gave Rodman an annoyed glance. “They’re sending a buggy. Means they don’t trust us not to wander off between here and Belczak’s door.”
“What a shock.” Rodman swiveled out her seat and stood.
Without a word, Travers and Marin followed her aft, into a small crew lounge which seemed overcrowded by six. The Lung was meant to run with half as many, plus a complex AI and a handful of drones. Travers had never worked on ships this size. Even Richard’s Earthlight was large by comparison. But van Donne and his people seemed oblivious to the tight quarters, and Travers remembered that the Mako, despite its armor and formidable power, was no larger than this ship.
“They’re sending a buggy,” Rodman informed them.
“Belczak wants eyes on you, every moment,” Ramon snorted. “What did you do, to fill him with such trust?”
“Belczak doesn’t trust anybody,” van Donne said darkly. “He’d run surveillance on his own kin, if he had any, which he doesn’t. When you murder your way to command, you don’t dare shut your eyes to sleep.” He pushed up out of the seat and made a face as the half-healed wounds pulled. Byrne was beside him at once, and Ramon offered his shoulder, if van Donne wanted it. This time, van Donne waved them both away. “Not here. Not in front of these bastards. Show them a weakness and they’ll shove a knife into it.”
It was a poor commentary on Freespacers, and Travers shared a dark look with Marin. Not all were like the Celeste crew. Vaurien’s people were very different, and Travers had always believed that for every bastard among the Freespacers there were three good people. Celeste was not the place to find them.
“You watch yourself,” Ramon was saying as van Donne made his way to the port side ’lock, where the ramp was going down with a grinding of worn-out machinery. “The air’s too thin, the oxygen’s too low, the gravity’s a bitch, the heat’s way high, and when the wind blows out of the north, don’t go out, don’t breathe in it, because it’s loaded with crap from the mines.”
“And you know that’s wh
ere the Shanghai survivors are,” Travers said bitterly. “Damn, Bill Grant’s going to have his work cut out for him.”
“He can handle it,” Marin said, quiet, reserved, acerbic. “Remember the work he did on the Intrepid.”
As if Travers would ever forget. Those scenes would haunt him as long as he lived. The ramp was down, the ’lock had growled open, and he coughed as he took his first breath of the rubbish Celeste called air. Dust and desiccation irritated his lungs, which gave a faint spasm as they tried to adjust to the low oxygen levels, and the heat was like the draft off a furnace. Worse was the gravity, which soared as they stepped out of the artificial environment of the ship.
It felt as if he were carrying a full battle pack, the full load of arms and ammo. Marin said nothing, but Hubler swore lividly as he took his weight on those biocyber prostheses, and Ramon whistled as he stepped off the ramp. To live here happily, humans would have to be modified, and the result would be something like the Mazjeet. The Pakrani and Kuchini could live here, but even they would not thrive.
“Jesus freakin’ Christ,” Ramon gasped, loitering at the foot of the ramp, “they want slave labor to work in this?”
“With breathpacks,” Hubler’s gruff voice said as he stomped out of the cockpit, heavy-footed, ungainly. “And goggles, and thermals at night, when it gets cold enough to turn your piss to ice cubes before it hits the ground.”
“Oh, nice,” Marin murmured, breathless as he would have been in the Resalq town of Riga, which was oxygen poor due to altitude. He set a hand on Travers’s arm and pointed. “Here’s our ride.”
“As if we were likely to wander off in this crap they call an atmosphere.” Rodman coughed and hugged her chest.
“You must have done something to rub Belczak the wrong way,” van Donne wheezed.
“You think?” Rodman was leaning on the hull, watching a glass-top truck come rattling through the paddock, where hummocks and depressions in the Arago-burned ground set it lurching and wallowing.
The house AI was in control of it. Hubler drove the whole company before him as the truck came to a rumbling stop in the shadow of the Hong Lung and popped its fore and aft canopies. As Travers stepped aboard he heard the ship’s boarding ramp grind back into place and lock. Marin was in beside him a moment later, while van Donne was trying to arrange his body in the back, in some position which would not torment him as the truck wallowed back toward the mansion. Travers did not envy him.
As the canopies snicked back into place, fresh air streamed from a half dozen vents. Travers took a deep breath, and another, and gave Marin a self-mocking look. “I’m getting soft. I used to lead conscript kids through battlefield simulations as bad as this.”
“Getting old, Travers,” van Donne accused.
Marin made a quiet sound of humor as the truck swung around, turned its blunt nose toward the mansion, and the motors howled in protest under the load. In the back, van Donne groaned and swore lividly as it lurched, and shifted around to brace himself.
Surrounding the mansion was a thick stucco wall the same height as the flat roof, punctuated by several security gates which looked like blastdoors salvaged from a warship. One of these slid open as the truck approached, and with a last rocking heave the vehicle was inside.
Containment fields meshed overhead, maintaining a more agreeable atmosphere, and in the shade of great sails the courtyards were cooler. The truck had pulled into a yard at the side of the house, where the windows were half-dimmed and a thin thread of music carried from inside. The contrapuntal harmonies of Bevan Daku were unmistakable.
Impressed, Travers and Marin stepped down onto gray marble tiles where they smelt frangipani and blue Pacifica and the sweet neroli of the dwarf orange trees which grew in tubs around the inside of the wall. Hundreds of trees contributed to the better oxygen levels under the fields, augmenting the output of vents which appeared in the ground every ten meters.
“You’re looking at big money,” Marin observed.
“This whole sorry ball of rock is a money machine.” Rodman drew the back of one hand across her face in sultry heat under the containment fields. “And if Belczak hadn’t seized it, somebody else would have. Irene Danko was never going to hold onto it.”
“Too weak a leader?” Travers wondered.
“Too short of bastard lackeys.” Making his way down from the truck with exaggerated caution, van Donne sounded asthmatic. “Her crew found this place, and don’t think she wasn’t a barracuda. She staked a claim but she got into the middle of a feeding frenzy, and the biggest, meanest shark is the one all the little sharks swarm around.” He pulled one finger across his throat. “Shot dead in a legit face-off.”
“Legit? Sure,” Rodman allowed bitterly, “but Belczak didn’t have the balls to do it himself. He had some gun like Ramon, a pro, come in here and take her head right off at the shoulders. That’s old Henri Belczak for you … and you notice how scum,” she added cynically, “always floats on top.”
The soft whine of servos alerted Travers, and he and Marin turned as a door opened in the house. Two figures appeared, and Travers bit off a curse as he saw that both were slaves, and both had recently been on the Shanghai. The marks were easy to spot – the buzz cut hair just beginning to grow out, the unit badges tattooed onto shoulders and forearms, the service numbers and ‘kill flags’ identifying not merely the ship, but even the companies in which these two had served.
The young man was still in his teens, the young woman a couple of years older, both conscripts, both still muscular and lean after the Fleet training and the high-protein diet on the crewdeck. They would have been the best-looking of the stock transshipped through Halfway, and their looks spared them both the mines and the sexshops. Clad in scraps of flimsy silk-like stuff, they stood to either side of the door and seemed to resist the impulse to assume the braced attitude of guard duty.
The woman, whose left cheek still carried the intricate flared tattoos of a unit calling itself Los Caballeros, nodded in through the door. “Captain Rodman, you’re wanted. But I don’t know about the rest.”
“The rest?” Rodman stepped out ahead of Hubler, van Donne’s people, Travers and Marin. “You’re not making my crew welcome?”
“Me? I don’t give the proverbial shit,” the woman said mockingly, “but the boss might break a blood vessel.”
“Like that would bother you,” Hubler snorted. He stomped closer and stabbed one blunt forefinger at the kids’ unit badges. “You’re Shanghai chicken. You don’t try to bust out of here?” He leaned over to read the names tattooed into their shoulders along with the service numbers. “You taken a look at yourself lately, Corporal Akanishi? You look like you belong in a sexshop. Same as you, Trooper Escobar. What, you can’t break some bastard skull and walk out of here?”
Akanishi was the woman. Her blue eyes widened as she recognized the voice of an officer, and the heat of anger rose in her face at the overt provocation. “Walk out of here and go where? There’s no place to go but the next shithole mining town, no way off the planet without stealing a ship, and if you think a couple of dumb-ass crewdeck grunts like Danny Escobar and me can handle a Weimann jump, you need to get you butt back in class, sir, and learn how the real world works.”
Beside her, the taller, broader, quieter Escobar made noises of agreement. “We thought about it … then we thought, shit, we’re already sittin’ in the part of this crap-pile that every other bastard on the planet wants to get into. All you gotta do is keep the lip zipped, do like you’re told and don’t mind the sex.”
“Spoken,” Hubler growled, “like a true house slave.”
“Spoken,” Akanishi said nastily, “like a survivor who’s gonna play by the rules and get out of this goddamn shitpit alive.” She glared up at Hubler, who was a head taller. “Who the hell are you? Fleet? You’re lucky I don’t squeal to the AI, earn some chalk marks over your bleeding corpse.”
“That’s how you get promoted around here,” Escobar a
dded. “Sell out your brother, move up in the ranks. See? Conscription taught us a thing or two. Taught us how to obey brain-dead orders, say yessir, and take your licks when some dumb-ass officer says you’ve earned ’em.”
Hubler’s lip curled in disgust. “No Fleet wankers here, son. Freespacers, the lot of us. Fleet doesn’t give a shit if you rot out here. Somebody does, but not Fleet.” He gestured at Travers and Marin. “Couple of agents, got business with your boss.”
“Agents?” Akanishi’s eyes narrowed.
“Zip the lip, girl,” Rodman barked. “Slave, remember? Do like you’re told, show us to the boss. You gotta be flogged to your knees to get a little obedience out of you?”
“No,” Escobar said curtly, “just offered the mines as an alternative. You jump back into line real quick, lady. Get on Belczak’s wrong side, and you can learn that the hard way.”
“Me?” Rodman stepped past the boy, into the cool dimness of the house. “You seem to have me confused with conscript trash.” And then her voice rose to a bellow. “Henri, it’s Rodman, where the Christ are you? You got two useless pieces of crap calling themselves doormen here!”
The music of Bevan Daku was drifting from a room far off to the left, where the house’s passages began to ramble into wings and additions. Another slave, a little older, much more slender, with long black hair and indeterminate gender, appeared there. Hands clasped, he or she bowed deeply and said in an odd accent, while apparently consulting the floor,
“This way, please. Only quiet, please, so sorry. Would be liking tea or coffee, please? Must make, very quick, so sorry.”