by Adam Carter
“So you are her ship?”
“Tell me your story, Rosalita, and I might just answer that.”
“My story? I don’t have a story.”
“Come on, everyone has a story.”
There was a moment’s silence on the other end. Then she said, “Fine. I was a dust miner on the halo ring of Jupiter. There’s so much dust in the halo ring we have permission to collect some of it. Basically, we just scoop up the dust, break down anything which might be a little bigger and transport everything to a factory where anything valuable is extracted.”
“What’s valuable about the dust rings of Jupiter?”
“It’s a fairly pleasant shade of blue. They tend to use it in jewellery.”
“Fine. Work dried up?” Hawthorn guessed.
“No. The problem was conservationists. Just like they’d stop people hunting endangered species, they curtailed the amount of dust we could remove from Jupiter’s rings. Like anyone cares how much dust Jupiter has in its rings. The Saturnians make a thriving export in what they break down from Saturn’s rings, so why can’t we do the same? Just because there aren’t as many rocks and ice balls around Jupiter, it shouldn’t make a difference.”
“You’re getting angry, Rosalita,” Hawthorn said, “and drifting from the point. What happened?”
“Turns out the firm I was contracting for hadn’t been entirely upfront about how much dust they were collecting. Turns out I was illegally working where I was and the police came for me. So I ran. Illegal mining of Jupiter’s rings carries a life sentence.”
“That sounds harsh.”
“Has something to do with ruining the landscape or something.”
“You ran into the slavers, I take it, and signed yourself up.”
“Not exactly. I was hiding in a war zone. Everyone’s trying to flee those places, I figured the cops wouldn’t come after me even if they knew I was there. Then the war ended, really suddenly. Someone dropped a bomb on the enemy country, wiped out the whole place. But the idiots must have used a nuke or something because the country I was in was blasted by a massive wave of death. People fell in the streets like they had the plague or something. I could hear the screams from miles away, carried to me on the wind.
“There were shelters, though, and the luckiest of us managed to reach them. After about a week, this great ship landed, the Obsidian, and its captain paid us a visit. He explained he was ferrying slaves to someplace on Io and he could take us with him. He even brought the paperwork. We sign away the rest of our lives and we get to live those lives. Board, food, health care, maybe a little money. It was either that or wait for the radiation to get us or for our food to run out.
“So everyone signed up, obviously. And Captain Gardener took us away from that hellhole.”
“This is what I mean,” Hawthorn said. “Wraith, these people were forced into this.”
“Doesn’t sound like they were forced to me.”
“We didn’t have any choice,” Rosalita said. “Most people had families, so it was the only way to save them.”
“There are children on board the Obsidian?” Hawthorn asked.
“Sure, whole families. When I heard about how Lady Dubois treated her slave, I figured that wouldn’t be such a bad life. If I have to be a slave, at least I could live in a decent place. And maybe if she took me, she could hide me from the police at the same time.”
Hawthorn was about to tell her he would be right over to rescue her, but he could see Wraith narrowing his eyes in thought. He allowed Wraith to approach the console.
“You’re taking an awfully big risk telling us this,” Wraith said. “You didn’t have to tell us about your criminal history, for one thing. What’s to stop us calling Captain Gardener and reporting all this to him? I mean, you even gave us your name, which was pretty stupid.”
“Nothing’s stopping you. But then if you did that I’d just have to find the Lady Dubois and slit her pretty little throat. I’m resourceful enough to evade the cops by going to a war zone, I’m resourceful enough to get to this comms unit when I’m supposedly being watched twenty-four seven, I’m sure I could be resourceful enough to find your mistress before I’m handed over to the cops.”
“I knew it,” Wraith muttered.
“I’d like to give you time to think about this,” Rosalita said, “but even I can’t have unlimited access to a comms unit so this is pretty much it for me. I need your answer. Are you going to come rescue me? After that we can go our separate ways and as long as the cops don’t catch up to me I don’t have to mention this to anyone.”
Wraith and Cassiel were shaking their heads.
“You have a deal,” Hawthorn said and terminated the call.
“Great,” Wraith said, “now we’re going to become criminals.”
“I can’t get a criminal record,” Cassiel said, shocked. “I might not get into Heaven.”
“I think we should be more concerned with what happens to us in this life,” Wraith said.
“Which is precisely the attitude that gets people turned away at the gates.”
“We’re not arguing about this,” Hawthorn said. “For the moment we’re not going to be doing anything. Hopefully Iris and Wyatt will come back with the information we want. We’ll tell them about Rosalita and incorporate her into our plans.”
“Right,” Wraith said. “Because plans have always gone so well for us in the past.”
There were a number of ways Hawthorn could have answered that, but none of them would have been particularly helpful. Cassiel had tightly folded her arms in a strop while Wraith had found a pencil and paper and was busy writing out his will. Hawthorn ignored them both. He hoped Harman wasn’t playing up quite as much for Arowana.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was certainly darker in the slaves’ area of the Obsidian, and there were so many bodies it was also a lot warmer. Harman did not know the original intention for the Obsidian, whether it had been built to ferry slaves or something else, but as Rayne brought him to the cargo area of the ship he could not help but feel he had entered a prison; and Wyatt Harman had been to a few prisons in his time.
The main area was large and flat, with a few long tables where the slaves were sitting to eat. This area also contained a vast open space, within which the slaves could presumably exercise or something, judging from what they appeared to be doing. Rising above this area were vast metal walkways and vertical bars which formed segmented cages, or cells. He could not see whether there were any locks on the cell doors, but could not see the point of having cells otherwise. He could imagine the prisoners rattling pans against the bars while they bayed for the blood of whoever was fighting in the exercise yard.
“You all right?” Rayne asked. “You zoned out there for a minute.”
“Just reliving bad memories.”
With a slight frown, Rayne opted against prying and continued moving through the area. There were a lot of slaves about them, either at the food table or the exercise yard, and Harman tried not to meet their gazes. For the most part their clothes were dishevelled, their expressions somewhat bland, empty in fact. No one looked miserable exactly, but there were a great many who were clearly just moving through their daily routines without giving any thought to what they were doing.
“They look like a happy bunch,” Harman noted to Rayne.
“They just came out of a war. The people here have lost their homes, family members, their very lives. If the captain hadn’t reached them when he did they would have faced a short future of starvation or radiation poisoning.”
“So instead they have a bright destiny working in someone else’s fields.”
“You make the life of a slave sound terrible.”
“I’m sure it is.” He remembered he was supposed to be a slave as well and added, “For other slaves, I mean. I have a cushy number, but we can’t all be so fortunate.”
“I can see why the Lady Dubois keeps you close to her. You act like a clown, you dre
ss like a clown …”
“What’s wrong with the way I dress?”
Rayne laughed. “And your comedy timing is perfect.”
Harman had never before been told he dressed like a clown and he wasn’t sure he liked it. A fop, a dandy, a merry man, certainly; but never a clown.
“What’s this, then?”
There was a frankly terrifying woman approaching them. She was thin, unhealthily so, and wore black and grey metal as though she thought she was some kind of soldier. Her head was half shaved, with the left half sporting short and spiky black hair. She wore an eyepatch over the least scary of her eyes, and her shoulders bore spikes just a little longer than those formed by her hair. At her side were strapped a knife and a whip, although thankfully there was no sign of a firearm.
“Mistress Haskell runs things down here,” Rayne explained quickly. “Don’t get on her bad side. Mistress Haskell, how are we today?”
Haskell stopped before them and snorted, her eyes never leaving Harman. “Who’s this?”
“A part of Lady Dubois’s retinue. You did get the message to bring some slaves up for the lady to view?”
“I got the message,” Haskell said with the tone that she felt incredibly inconvenienced because of it. “Just waiting for someone to come down and fetch them. I’m not leaving these slaves to what passes for my assistants to look after. Who knows what state things would be in when I got back.”
“Well, we can take them up for you,” Rayne said.
“Good. Saves me the bother. You a slave?”
“Me?” Harman asked.
“No, I’m talking to the wall.”
“The wall is slave to the ceiling, ma’am. But then we’re all slaves to the wall because without it we’d be breathing vacuum.”
“A comedian,” Haskell said, rolling her eye. “Heaven save us from comedians.”
“Do you have the slaves ready to go?” Rayne asked. “If so, we can be out of your hair in no time.”
“Which is precisely why, yes, I have them ready to go. The order didn’t give much information so I picked out a few of either sex and made sure they were the most presentable of the bunch. Not that many of them are presentable, but I picked ones that haven’t been puking their guts out the last couple of days.”
“There’s a sickness down here?” Harman asked.
“Radiation poisoning, probably. Rayne explained about the war?”
“Shouldn’t we get them a doctor?”
“The doctors have better things to be doing.”
“The doctors have better things to be doing than looking after sick people?”
“Wyatt,” Rayne said, fully aware how intimidating Haskell could be, “we’ve had other bouts of sickness on board lately. Our engineering staff went down and the doctors are concentrating their efforts on that.”
“Miss Rayne, there are sick people down here.”
“And the doctors will get to them eventually. Slaves just aren’t a priority.”
“They’re cargo,” Harman said, trying to think in the terms these people might understand. “At the very least, Captain Gardener won’t want them all dying before he can unload them the other end.”
“Captain Gardener is fully aware of the situation, Wyatt.”
“Which means there are more sick people than just your engineers. It’s the radiation, isn’t it? When you landed in the war zone, you weren’t properly shielded.”
“We never stop long enough to make adequate repairs. The captain didn’t mean to infect half the crew. He just …”
“Rayne,” Haskell warned, but Harman had heard enough to understand precisely what was going on. “Anyway,” Haskell continued, “there are a lot of people who aren’t showing any signs of sickness, among the crew and the slaves. It’s probably why the captain’s willing to make a trade out here in space, so he can unload some healthy slaves before they come down with something.”
Haskell waved over to some of the slaves and they approached at the signal. There were six of them, three of each sex, and they did not look all that happy to be on the Obsidian. Harman did not pay them much attention, although he caught the eye of one. She was aged somewhere in her thirties, with an untidy mop of dark hair and intense, somewhat fierce eyes. She did not look afraid. Annoyed, certainly, but not afraid.
Harman decided he would do the decent thing and console her.
“Good day, my dear,” he said. “Don’t be alarmed. You are about to be given the opportunity to be purchased by the greatest lady of them all, she who is mistress of my heart and soul.”
“Mistress of your heart and soul?” the woman asked.
“Indeed. Although I could just as easily have been speaking of you when I said such a thing.”
“Did you just say what I think you said?”
“And what name could go with such a pretty face?”
“Rosalita.”
“Ah, Rosalita. The way the Spanish name the rose. And what a fitting name for such a …”
“You don’t recognise the name?”
“I … Well, yes. I must do,” he laughed, “since I know it’s Spanish for rose.”
Rosalita waved her hand across her own face, down her chest, and back up to her face, as though she was trying to scrub herself with an invisible sponge. “None of this means anything? The name Rosalita, along with this face, and the fact you just used the term mistress of your heart and soul? Not ringing any bells at all?”
Harman tried desperately to think, but he had no idea what she was going on about. “A clue?” he asked.
Rosalita’s gaze could have wilted any roses in the room, Spanish or otherwise. “Three years ago. That little saloon on the outskirts of the Vega mines. The one which looked like it was lifted straight from the Wild West?”
“Oh yes, I’ve been there.”
“Funny, I used to work there.”
Harman opened his mouth, but closed it when he realised this probably meant they had met there.
“Wyatt Earp,” she said snidely. “That’s what you were calling yourself then. You thought it was a great name, thought Wyatt Earp was the best cowboy who ever lived. I didn’t have the heart to tell you he was a lawman.”
Harman snapped his fingers. “Rosalita! Yes, I remember you now.”
Her gaze became an inferno. “You remember me now? You remember me now?”
“Oh come on, it was just the one night. And I was incredibly drunk.”
Rosalita went for him, but Haskell put out a hand to stop her.
“What did she mean,” Rayne asked slowly, “when she said you were calling yourself Wyatt Earp back then? That’s the name you gave Captain Gardener.”
“Was it really?” Harman asked.
“Harman,” Rosalita said as she stopped struggling. She glowered at Haskell as well, but the slave mistress released her now she was no longer fighting. “His name’s Wyatt Harman. Or at least that was the name he told me was his real name. Who knows with this louse?”
“And he was a slave back then?” Rayne asked, trying to get her head around things.
“A slave?” Rosalita asked. “Wyatt wouldn’t make a very good slave. Too free of spirit, too much a hater of authority. If anyone should ever try to make him a slave he’d jump out the window and with his luck he’d land on a passing space whale.”
“Space whale?” Haskell said. “What’s a space whale?”
“Amazing creatures,” Harman said, eager to change the conversation. “Mythical mammals that ride through the gases of Jupiter. Prospectors mining the gas see them occasionally, although no one’s ever corroborated their existence. Sort of like modern-day mermaids.”
“And I wonder,” Rosalita said acidly, “where you got that story from.”
“Forget space whales,” Rayne said. “Who are you, Wyatt? Who are you really?”
“Me? I’m a nobody. Just an entertainer. A clown, just like you said.”
“And your name?”
“Wyatt.”
“I’m not pulling a con,” he said, trying to laugh it off. “I really am Iris’s slave.”
“How?” Rayne asked.
“How what?”
“How did you become her slave?”
“Oh, uh, how. How … how … Gambling debts. I amassed a lot of gambling debts.”
“Playing what?”
“Cards. Played a lot of poker, lost a lot of poker. Ended up putting my whole life on the line. Played an ace-high flush against a full house.”
“How long ago?”
“Oh, a year or more now.”
“And the terms of your enslavement?”
“Until the debt’s paid off.”
“The contract doesn’t say until the debt’s paid off,” Rayne said. “It gives a specific date. What is that date?”
“Usually I love talking about dates with ladies, Miss Rayne, but that’s kind of personal.”
Haskell’s knife was drawn and pressing against Harman’s throat before he had time to yelp. “Just answer the question, clown.”
“A year,” Harman said. “Just a year.”
“Yet,” Haskell said, “you’ve been with the Lady Dubois for a year or more now.”
“Did I say that?”
Haskell withdrew the knife. “Rayne, get back to the captain. Tell him we have imposters on board. I don’t know what they’re after, but I’ll get it out of this one.”
“Mistress Haskell, I really think we should …”
“Now, Rayne.”
Rayne pressed her lips tightly together and hurried off. Harman backed away a step, his hands raised. He looked to Rosalita, who was still angry but had an odd look on her face. Harman had worn that look before and reckoned she had through her emotional outburst ruined some plan she herself had afoot.
“Ladies, ladies,” Harman said, “we can talk about this civilly. After all, there’s plenty of me to go around.”
Haskell raised her knife. “There’ll be plenty of you going around in a minute, all right.”