Edge of Conquest (The Restoration Armada Book 1)

by Hugo Huesca

  “Pleased to meet ya,” Cooke said, flashing a tense smile and actually bending his waist a bit as if doing a reverence.

  Tourist, Delagarza thought with despair. If Lotti or her men thought Cooke was mocking their manners…

  Instead, Lotti laughed like a hyena and said, “You’re a charmer, Cookie Bear. You can call me any time. We’ll get milkshakes at the Soda Fountain.”

  The offer seemed to take the words out of Cooke’s mouth. Before the newcomer had a chance to embarrass himself, Delagarza butted in:

  “I heard you had something for me, Lotti-doll.”

  “Something for you? And what could that be?” Lotti said, giving him a sultry look while toying with her neon purple hair.

  It was a trap.

  “Business, I hear,” said Delagarza without missing a beat. Lotti smiled, the sultry look disappeared, and he knew he had passed the test.

  For gangers, sex and violence were closely intertwined, and the first option wasn’t available for the out-group. It wasn’t that Lotti wanted to attack him, it was just that these kinds of traps were the bread and butter of her group. A way to make sure you were dealing with friends. A loyalty test.

  “Got it in one, my regular,” she said. She turned to one of the male gangers, a gnarly kid with a dead stare. He searched his pockets and handed Lotti a fist-sized box, packed in shiny-red gift wrapping and a bow. “We found this and thought you may like it, given how you’re into ‘ware and all.”

  Lotti handed the gift box to Delagarza. He accepted it and said:

  “How thoughtful, Lotti-doll. I love gifts. What kind of computer?”

  Lotti shrugged. “Dunno, I’m not into ‘ware,” she said.

  “It’s a Motoko,” said the kid who had given Lotti the box, “from Seizo Electronics. They make sexy tamper locks, I hear, but the model is five years old. Nothing a manly cowboy like you can’t handle.”

  “Nerd,” Lotti told the guy, affectionately. Then added, to Delagarza, “What do you think?”

  “Seizo’s are solid models, but I can make do,” said Delagarza. “Both hard and soft locks they use, I’ve seen before. How about this? I take a look inside for you and send you anything I find. As a thank you for such a nice gift.”

  “Promise you won’t peek?” said Lotti. Given modern software, the more a piece of crypto-data had been observed, the less it was worth.

  “You know me, Lotti-doll,” said Delagarza, “I’m all about professional integrity.”

  She gave a look to her friends like a little girl who had just woken up to a pony in her bedroom. “You heard him, boys? Trusty buddy Sammie to the rescue again.”

  “All around regular guy,” agreed the gangers.

  Delagarza relaxed his shoulders. Reunion was over, and no one had gotten their eyes stabbed out. Next to him, Cooke smiled the same tense smile he had maintained during the entire talk.

  “Oh, here,” said Lotti, handing Cooke a hard-candy lollipop. “A little something for the road, Cookie Bear. So you remember me.”

  After the gangers were gone, Cooke handed Delagarza the candy-shaped psychedelic.

  “They didn’t seem so bad. Given gangers’ reputation,” said Cooke, “they seemed rather…friendly.”

  “That’s the point,” said Delagarza. “It’s based on old earther psychology, I hear. Gangers think that thugs acting all tough and aggressive are compensating for something, you see? So they do the exact opposite.”

  “To show that they are so tough and aggressive they don’t need to pretend,” Cooke said, following his train of thought.

  “Got it in one, my regular,” Delagarza said, briefly imitating gangers’ speech patterns.

  “A bit paradoxical, isn’t it?” Cooke said, after a brief pause.

  Delagarza laughed a dry, coarse laugh. Perhaps there would be hope for Cooke’s survival in Dione, after all. They walked in silence for a while, down the elongated corridors and cold parks of Alwinter.

  “Delagarza?” asked Cooke after the scenery had changed and they were closer to their office.

  “Yes?”

  “What’s a Soda Fountain?”

  “I honestly have no idea.”

  Modern computers were a headache. Powerful beyond their earther ancestors’ wildest dreams, yes, but also a knot of complexity that the Edge had long ago lost hope of untangling. Every corporation out there had their own software (or at the very least, a fork of the most popular ones), their custom OS, their tailor-made locks and encryption. Others had their own hardware, their own ports and exclusive devices, and they rarely worked with each other. The mayor competitors had stricken the word “compatibility” out of their thesaurus the moment they had stepped foot into space.

  It’s hard to enforce a non-monopolistic clause when said corp owns the life-support machines that keeps your lungs fed with tasty oxygen and away from nasty vacuum.

  A hundred years after the Edge’s colonization, it had reached a point were colonies banned the use of some lesser known ‘ware just in an attempt to keep the file-type bloat in control.

  Of course, corporations had their own experts to handle such issues. But if the common man or woman needed to, say, unlock an exotic computer they found lying around and actually read or use the data inside, they went to people like Delagarza, Cooke, or their boss, Jamilia Charleton.

  It was Charleton who owned the office where Delagarza and Cooke arrived after lengthy travel via public transportation. The place was technically more workshop than office, with half the available space occupied by a sea of tools and devices required for their profession. Delagarza himself had asked for about a third of the equipment since he had started to work with Charleton.

  Her part of the job was more social than technical. She spent most of her workday away from the office, sometimes even paying the non-trivial fare to Outlander Station to strike a deal with the contractors for their own used equipment. She made the deals over the sailors’ Net boards and did careful calculations to know if the equipment was worth the investment.

  All in all, neither she nor her employees were starving in the streets or scouring the trash for battery packs, but they weren’t rich, either.

  Today, Charleton was waiting for Delagarza, sitting comfortably by her desk and reading the news on Dione’s Net. Her glance flashed up for a second when Delagarza came in, then returned to her reading.

  “Sam,” she greeted him without looking up again, “you’ve been outside almost the entire day. Surely you haven’t been doing side-jobs on the clock again, have you?”

  Delagarza flashed her an innocent smile and gestured to Cooke to go to the back of the office and make himself useful.

  “C’mon, Jamilia,” he said, as he lowered his reg-suit’s hood and sauntered his way to her, “you know me better than that.”

  “Damn right I know you,” she said, holding his gaze, her features set in stone. “That’s why I don’t buy into your bullshit.”

  Charleton was a decade older than Delagarza, attractive in the reserved way of elegant, working women. Her black hair was streaked gray, a contrast to her dark skin and calculating eyes. They had been lovers, years ago, soon after Delagarza entered her employment. That spark had faded, leaving behind a placid camaraderie, like old veterans who served together in a war.

  “Can’t get anything past you,” Delagarza smiled. He explained all about Lotti’s gift box to her. She had no issue against side-jobs, as long as he never went behind on his official projects.

  After he was done, Charleton regarded him with a raised eyebrow. “Lotti found that Motoko lying around?”

  “Obviously,” Delagarza said, “why, you think she stole it? A regular citizen like her? Unthinkable.”

  “And you had to bring Cooke with you? He’ll get himself stabbed, or worse.”

  “He needs to learn to fend for himself. This is not Jagal after all. No Big Brother to babysit us.”

  “Big Brother?” Charleton scratched her chin. “You sure learned D
ione’s idiosyncrasies fast, Sam. Not long ago, you were a newcomer yourself. Nowadays, even the locals can’t tell you apart from the rest of us. Some people spend a lifetime here and can’t achieve that.”

  Delagarza shrugged, not sure if she was praising him, or damning him.

  Charleton sighed, closed her news-feed on her wristband, and said, “Doesn’t make you feel at least a bit guilty? Keeping Lotti’s ‘ware.”

  Behind his smile, the only thing that Delagarza felt was a deep tiredness he couldn’t get rid of. Truth be told, he hadn’t slept well, lately. But if he told Charleton that, she would claim it was his conscience trying to reach him.

  “Better to feel guilty and warm than decent and frozen,” he said. Before she could answer, he produced the lollipop from his pocket and handed it to her. “Here, a gift.”

  Charleton eyed the candy for a second, realized what it was, and barked a laugh. “For sure, you know what a girl likes, Sam,” she said. It pretty much settled morality chat for the day.

  Delagarza nodded, waited until she put the candy away, and asked her, “What brings you to the office so early in the day? It’s not like you to take breaks.”

  Her pleasant, distant smile disappeared, and she was back to business again.

  “Right. Truth is…I wanted to talk to you. We have a contract, a lucrative one.”

  “Good,” Delagarza said, wondering what was the issue, “so let’s do it.”

  “They asked specifically for you, by name,” Charleton went on. Delagarza didn’t miss that she was reluctant to give him a straight answer. “Apparently, you’re the planet’s only expert in the ‘ware they’re looking to crack open. An old model, long discontinued.”

  “Great,” said Delagarza, “if we’re their only option, we’ll milk them for all they’re worth. Who are they, and what’s the model?”

  His boss thought for a second before answering:

  “Enforcers. Probably Tal-Kader, but they wouldn’t say. They want you to crack a Shota-M for them, but first you’d have to pass a loyalty test.”

  At the mention of “loyalty test,” Delagarza whistled loudly. He knew the reputation those tests had. Everyone did.

  To fail one meant you were a traitor. And the penalty for treason was death.

  “Oh,” Delagarza said.

  4

  Chapter Four

  Clarke

  When Clarke regained consciousness, he was tied to a chair in a pitch-dark room, hands behind his back, ankles pulled together. He had a terrible headache, no idea where he was, and the grim certainty that he had ended up in one of Internal Affair’s infamous blacksites.

  A beam of white light shone right at his face, making Clarke’s eyes water and his vision get blurry with stars. Clarke bit back a groan, blinked furiously, and waited.

  “Joseph A. Clarke,” drawled a male voice at the other end of the desk that supported the interrogation lamp. “Forty-five years old, divorced, no children. Your ex-wife is a loyal SA citizen, who has cut all contact with you. Smart lady.”

  It was clear the voice was reading from a file, but the light of the lamp kept Clarke from seeing the faint back-light of a wristband at the other end of the desk. He kept quiet, his mind blank, his respiration in check so his pulse wouldn’t skyrocket.

  “Cargo hauler, independent contracts. Three Free Traders in the last five years, currently a dock worker between contracts. Moderate consumer of alcoholic beverages, no criminal records, a timely tax payer. Excellent health, no stim juice rejection yet. Current partner…Julia Fillon, known EIF collaborator.”

  Clarke’s jaw tightened. He didn’t know about Julia’s association with the EIF, though he wasn’t going to act like he never saw it coming. The girl thought she was immortal. Clarke knew otherwise. He had seen too many like her die.

  “Internal Affairs’ dossier marks you as…inconsequential, but to be kept on watch,” the voice went on. At the end of each sentence, the voice waited for a couple seconds, as if waiting for Clarke to confirm or deny his claims.

  Good to know I’m appreciated, Clarke thought, grimly. He said nothing.

  “Quite a boring curriculum, isn’t it? But if we look back ten years…things get interesting,” the voice said.

  Pause. Silence. The man continued:

  “Lieutenant Commander Joseph A. Clarke of the Systems Alliance Defense Fleet, serving in the SADF destroyer Applegate, stationed in high Jagal’s orbit.”

  Clarke cringed. He knew what was coming next. The voice read a passage out of the dossier:

  “During the Battle of Broken Sky, Clarke assumed command of the Applegate after its Captain was terminated during firing exchange with the dreadnought Mississippi. Disobeying previous instructions to maintain engagement with the Mississippi, Clarke instructed the Applegate’s crew to evacuate the vessel while directing the remaining transports to non-combat endeavors. After the battle was over, Clarke was found inside the Applegate as its last remaining occupant.”

  Even after a decade, Clarke could still remember the week and a half he had spent inside that emergency cabin deep in the destroyer’s bowels, equipped only with meager rations long past their expiration date, and a faulty life-support machine that had maintained pressurization only by a miracle.

  Sometimes, he still had dreams about it, the hours that lasted as long as cycles in the interminable silence, all alone with the knowledge that out there, his people were getting slaughtered.

  That was if he was lucky. If he wasn’t, he dreamed about the battle beforehand. About the Mississippi’s cannons tearing apart ship armor plating like it was wet cardboard, the volleys of torpedoes that had deleted battleship Peregrine off the tactical grid with no survivors.

  “Clarke spent the months after the battle in a cell,” the voice went on, “and merely escaped death by firing squad on a technicality. He was discharged out of the DF in disgrace, his name scraped out of its registry. He has spent the following decade on Jagal while not in a merchant ship contract. He has kept a low profile, presumably to avoid the…dangers…of public life.”

  The voice kept quiet again, like daring Clarke to contradict the dossier, to say that wasn’t how it had happened. But what would Clarke gain by doing that? Internal Affairs didn’t care about the truth. They cared about keeping peace on a planet besieged by decades-long overseer, capable of glassing the capital city with the push of a button.

  “Is there anything you want to add?” the voice said.

  Go fuck yourself. Clarke said nothing.

  “Very well,” the voice said. The beam of light shining on Clarke’s face got narrower, closer, and he could now feel an actual mask of heat pouring on his face. A little longer and he’d begin to sweat. “Silence will only make it harder on yourself, you know? You may want to try to go with a clear conscience when your times comes. It’ll make it easier.”

  The man chuckled to himself, and went on, saying, “There’s little to discuss, Clarke. It seems rather open and shut. You were allowed to live—if you may call what you do living—this long because IA had more important things to focus on, and it was good for the morale of the other veterans of Broken Sky to keep you around. But, what do you know, times change. There’s an opening in our agenda. And what better way to use our free time than doing some house cleaning?”

  That got Clarke to break his silence.

  “Stop talking about it, and do it, instead of wasting my time,” he told, shifting his face in the direction the man’s voice was coming from.

  “Ah,” said the man, “that would be wasteful. Bullets are expensive, haven’t you heard? We’re under siege, after all. No, Clarke, we will not kill you until you earn back the price of your bullet. Shame you don’t like to talk, but we have tools for people like you.”

  Hair stood on end on Clarke’s arms. Apart from the obvious threat, there had been something in that spiel that didn’t mesh up with Clarke’s expectations. Like a completed puzzle with a piece from a different set right at the middl
e.

  Something is wrong, Clarke thought.

  Interrogation was a nasty business, with no way of coming on top. In the end, everyone talks. Even in the rigid beliefs of the Systems Alliance navy, there was little shame in breaking under torture.

  But that didn’t mean it had to be easy, or that a determined soldier couldn’t stick it to the interrogators in some way, if he kept calm and was smart.

  “Wait,” Clarke said, adding a desperate note to his voice to appease the men behind the desk. “Give me a minute to think.”

  “You have until my tools get here.”

  Clarke had been trained, along with all the other officers of his class, in three main ways of resisting interrogations. One was to lie to gain time, another was to give fake information to alert his allies that he had been compromised. Neither worked in this situation. There wasn’t an army waiting for him to alert them, and he could not lie when he didn’t know what his captors wanted.

  But he could try the third option. Play along, fish for information, try to learn something about his captors. Maybe, with a mad stroke of luck, capitalize on a chance to escape. Or at least sell his hide at a higher price.

  I may as well keep going and see where this takes me.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked aloud.

  “Not so brave after all, huh?” came the instant reply. “I guess the Fleet’s name for you was justified. Craven Clarke.”

  “Must be. The SA is never wrong.” The jibe meant little to Clarke, one of many nicknames used during his trial by the Tal-Kader lawyers trying to get him killed by firing squad.

  “Well said, Craven Clarke. You should have kept that in mind when the Applegate received instructions to fight on.”