by Hugo Huesca
“What?” asked Delagarza. He blinked and stared at the doctor like she had suddenly started speaking ganger jargon. “I thought I didn’t get the job.”
“Why would you believe that?” Kircher said, raising an eyebrow at him. She appeared genuinely surprised. “You’re the only in-system man who has a shot at cracking our ‘ware. The only way you wouldn’t get the job is if the nanobots had fried you.”
Delagarza found that words failed him. He really had mistaken how the enforcers worked…
“But what I said about Tal-Kader…” he said without bothering to finish the sentence.
“Your political options may make Strauze think you’re a fool, but they’re not a deal breaker,” Kircher told him.
As if to underline her point, the automatic doors slid open to reveal Major Strauze. A woman followed after him, dressed in the black uniform of the enforcers.
“Everything is in order,” Strauze announced, and then took out a gunmetal cube from his pockets. Its surface was bent as if someone had dropped it at some point.
Delagarza extended his hand, but Strauze’s arm didn’t move. He held to the cube while he gestured at the enforcer next to him. “Lisanne Krieger, Samuel Delagarza. Delagarza, you’ll work together with Krieger. She’s your bodyguard and your babysitter from now on. Just don’t let the Shota-M get out of her sight and you two will be best friends.”
Krieger nodded without her lips curving into a smile even for a degree. Real friendly gal.
Delagarza had no doubts that Krieger’s real duty was to keep an eye on the Shota-M.
“If you check your account, you’ll see half the payment is already there,” Strauze went on, “along with access to a small Tal-Kader credit line. Use it for whatever you need to get the job done.”
“How much are we talking about?” asked Delagarza, automatically, without being able to hide the way his ears perked when he heard the words “Tal-Kader credit line.”
“Whatever you need to get the job done,” Strauze repeated, “unless that involves buying a warship. If you somehow need to buy a warship, call me first and I’ll clear it for you.”
Sweet baby Reiner, I’m in way over my head, thought Delagarza. His face paled several degrees.
Just what was inside that Shota-M?
Strauze handed the cube to Delagarza, using careful and controlled movements that reminded Delagarza of a kid who’s reluctant to part away with a favorite toy.
“This is the Shota-M,” Strauze said. Delagarza frowned. As if he wouldn’t recognize the damn thing— “Guard it with your life.”
The or else was implied by his tone. Delagarza held the computer with care.
He may not like the man, but he wasn’t about to find out what Strauze—Tal-Kader—did to those who failed them.
6
Chapter Six
Clarke
Given what Clarke knew of bribes and docking permits, Free Trader Beowulf, Traveller-class, Gamma variant, couldn’t legally abandon Jagal’s orbit, much less make a living in the first place.
Yet, not only had Antonov insisted Beowulf would have no problems leaving Jagal’s orbital starport, Clarke suspected the man also financed the entire operation out of his personal credit line.
The possibility clashed with the image people had of the EIF: a rag-tag group of misfits that made do with rusty buckets geared with Alcubierre Drives and slug-throwers for weaponry, opposing the SA by pirating and financed by unsanctioned oryza mining.
When he thought about it, Clarke’s military training suggested other alternatives. Perhaps Free Trader Beowulf was a lone investment, an emergency vessel for when the EIF’s leadership in Jagal needed to conduct operations in other systems.
The idea had its flaws. Alcubierre Drives consumed a lot of oryza during interstellar travel, and if the EIF truly had a presence in all the systems of the Edge, as its propaganda signals liked to claim, then it would be cheaper to skip the trip and pocket the cash.
Clarke could go to Antonov and ask. The EIF director was part of the passengers Beowulf would ship to planet New Angeles.
Antonov would refuse to answer, claiming that, for security reasons, he could not discuss the finer points of their mission until they had left Asherah. He and Clarke had already gone over that dance before boarding the Free Trader.
There was no fault in that reasoning. In the capital of the Edge, one never knew who was listening. Even the sealed interior of a spaceship wasn’t a guarantee of privacy.
Don’t kid yourself, Clarke thought, you know why you don’t want to leave your quarters.
It would mean confronting Julia.
He knew he’d have to talk to her sooner or later; she was one of Beowulf’s passengers, after all. Only rich passenger liners could afford the comfort of enough space to avoid facing an ex.
He forced himself to stop thinking about her. It would do him no good to hold a grudge against the woman, she had done what she thought was best.
That was the trouble with people with causes.
Clarke sighed and plopped his body into his bed. The frame creaked under his weight, and his ankles dangled out if he tried to stretch. But hell, he had lived in worse conditions during his planet-side stays.
All in all, the quarters were comfortable enough. He had a desk with a crappy computer terminal installed, a closet pre-loaded with the Beowulf uniforms and an emergency vacuum suit, a mini-bar loaded with snacks (not free), and a simulated window that showed whatever he liked. Currently, it showed deep space, away from any known star.
Technically, he could spend the entire time locked down in his quarters, take-off and landing excepted. He had been registered at the Beowulf’s billets as a crewman, but Antonov had insisted it was only to help them fool customs. Since the customs officer had already made his trip around the ship seventeen hours ago, and found nothing faulty or suspicious, Clarke was free to enjoy the free interstellar trip as a passenger.
He knew he wouldn’t do it. Since his youth, he could never remain long without making himself useful. It was the way his parents had raised him.
In fact, he decided he’d go out to help the crew ready the ship before take-off. He enjoyed manual labor. It was a kind of meditation, a way to let his problems wash away while hauling heavy cargo in a fraction of Earth’s gravity.
But first, someone knocked at his door.
He smoothed over his Beowulf overalls with one hand before opening answering. He found himself face to face with Julia Fillon.
Of course.
“Julia,” he said.
“Joseph,” she said, with as neutral an expression as his.
She hovered before the door frame until she realized that Clarke wasn’t going to move to let her in. If that bothered her, it didn’t show.
“Captain Navathe announced take off procedure start in six hours. Everyone needs to be strapped to their seats by then,” she said, “I thought I’d let you know.”
“Understood,” said Clarke. He knew it was bull. His wristband was synced to Beowulf’s intranet, and the timer at a corner of the screen wouldn’t let him forget about take-off countdown. Julia knew this, since she wore a wristband the same as him.
So, he waited for her to tell her part.
“Can we talk?” Julia asked.
Clarke wasn’t keen to passive aggression, so he ignored the I don’t know, can we? response a part of his brain suggested. Instead, he said, “Go ahead.”
“I’m sorry you reacted poorly to the EIF’s test,” said Julia, “I understand you want nothing to do with me, but I wanted you to understand why I did what I did.”
The way she had worded her apology—sorry you reacted poorly—was enough to piss off even Space Gandhi. Clarke’s shoulders were as tense as ripcords.
“You mean, why you had me kidnapped, drugged, and gaslighted,” Clarke pointed out.
“For a good reason,” she said. “We need your expertise, Clarke. There’s not exactly many retired fleet officers in Jag
al that aren’t in league with the Defense Fleet.”
“That’s why you jumped into my bunk all this time? You needed to keep an eye on a possible asset?”
“Bullshit,” she said, her eyes flashing a pang of pain which disappeared before Clarke was sure he saw it. “We had no idea the mission was happening. Same day the EIF contacted you was when we heard about it. I recommended you because I knew your history. The real one. I know you won’t fail the people.”
“So says Antonov,” said Clarke. Julia knew as much of their supposed mission as Clarke did, which was nothing. “See? The problem with associating with people who are good at playing mind-games is that you never know when they’re playing with you.”
“It’s for a good cause,” she said.
“Everyone justifies their actions by saying that,” said Clarke. “The enforcers protect the integrity of the Edge, Tal-Kader protects the economy, Commodore Terry protects mankind’s cohesion.”
“In this case, it’s true,” said Julia. Just as many officers in Clarke’s time had said to justify the atrocities committed during their command. “You agree with us already, you agreed to help us.”
“No,” said Clarke, “I agreed to hear you out. Antonov is bringing me to New Angeles so he can sell me his mission without fear of Big Brother watching. If at any point it sounds like a suicide run or a terrorist bombing, I’m riding the Beowulf right back at Jagal.”
“Terrorist bombing?” Julia’s fist clenched so hard Clarke wondered if he had a punch coming his way. “You sound like Tal-Kader’s show hosts. Maybe it makes sense. I told myself you were doing this for the people, not for Antonov’s offer to reinstate you back to the Fleet with your uniformed buddies. Seems like I was wrong.”
“You wanted a soldier,” Clarke said, letting her accusation wash over him like water over teflon, “you got one.”
He’d never trust organizations that claimed to know what the people wanted or needed, no matter how noble their cause, especially when they believed all morality trickled down from their group. To Clarke, morality came from people’s minds and hearts, from empathy and honor.
A soldier may follow orders, may even kill on command. But the instant he forgot why he did so, he was lost.
Julia’s nose twitched in the way it did when she was pissed. Clarke had once thought it was endearing.
She controlled herself, and her fists unclenched. She took a step back, ending the conversation.
“Clarke,” she said.
“Fillon.”
Clarke watched her march down the corridor, stamping on the naked gunmetal floor as she went.
So much for apologies.
In the end, Clarke donned his pressure suit and made himself useful by going to the Beowulf’s cargo hold and lending a hand to the crew there. Technically, all containers had to be secured days before take-off, but any sailor with enough experience knew that there was always a last-minute disaster.
Today, the last-minute emergency took the form of a titanium alloy cord that had snapped near bay B23 and collapsed half a container row, like a row of dominoes falling down. Half the ship’s crew, excluding EIF passengers, were there, about forty men and women clad in pressure suits, manning cranes and heavy equipment while filling the radio channels with chatter and an unending string of yelling and cursing.
It was perfect. Clarke mouthed his qualifications to a red-faced foreman and assigned himself to a small team of haulers for whom the trip to New Angeles marked the start of their first two-year-long contract.
By the time the damage to the container row was fixed, Clarke was so tired he welcomed the incoming zero g. His body burned with physical exertion, but machines handled most of the heavy lifting nowadays. It was the numb sensation of his mind that he enjoyed the most, like he had achieved a miniature nirvana for a brief moment. He knew that, when he went to sleep for the night, he’d have no dreams, just a refreshing rest. Good, because otherwise he may think too hard about what the EIF’s had in store for him, and he may balk before hearing them out.
Instead of Captain Navathe’s six-hour estimate for leaving Jagal’s spaceport, it took twelve hours before the announcement blared on the speakers.
“Attention all crew and passengers,” said Navathe’s invisible voice, coming down from the speakers, “all preparations are finalized. Take-off will begin shortly. Report to your stations and to your assigned seats.”
Clarke’s assigned station was all the way to the first deck, close to the captain’s cabin. Before he made his way to the airlock on the second deck, a couple of his new contractor friends stopped him and invited him to ride the acceleration g’s in the crew quarters. Clarke accepted at once. He wasn’t ready to face the EIF. There’d be enough time for that, since the trip to New Angeles would last six weeks.
The Beowulf, like most commercial cargo ships, was designed as a belly lander, an optimal configuration to store cargo, and a poor configuration for human beings. Belly landers’ engines were situated at the stern of the ship, perpendicular to the keel, and opposite the command cabin, which was traditionally set at the bow. This tradition was avoided in military ships, since the command crew preferred to be as far away from incoming fire as possible.
When a belly lander crosses the distance between planetary space and the nearest Alcubierre point (a spot in space where the conditions were optimal for FTL travel, with enough distance to a star’s gravity well being the most important) it uses the explosive characteristics of the oryza to power its fusion drives.
This means that, during the two to three days it takes to reach an Alcubierre point, the ship’s acceleration creates a fake gravity centered on the engines. To better understand why this is annoying, picture having to spend three days walking on the walls of your house, not allowed to come down to the floor, which is now just another wall. Good luck sleeping on that bed.
Edge engineering firms’ solution was to add special crash-cushioned seats for everyone on board, built to lend support to the squishy human body against the ball-crushing effects of sailing through space while accelerating at three to five times Earth’s gravity. During those three days, not a single soul is allowed to leave the seats, with pauses for bathroom use, eating, and stretching.
After the ship reached the Alcubierre point and generated its energy-density ring, six weeks at zero g would follow, with its own problems and annoyances for the crew.
Veteran sailors called this switch “Pop’s old one-two combo.”
Clarke strapped himself to the first available seat, updated his location in the ship’s intranet (so the computer wouldn’t flag him as missing), and turned to the contractor next to him, a pock-faced guy of about fifteen years old. Clarke realized the kid was staring with dismay at the speakers by the quarter’s walls, listening intently to Captain Navathe’s announcements like a religious man in a church sermon.
“First time aboard a spaceship?” Clarke asked him.
The kid tried hide his apprehension by toughening into a frown. But when he realized Clarke wasn’t making fun of him, he nodded slightly.
“We’ve all been there,” Clarke said. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. You brought any good videos in your wristband? Better for you to be distracted until the combo.”
Most of the crew was useless during the three-day window, except for the command crew and a few others. When he had been but a cog in the Defense Fleet war machine, Clarke and his fellow ensigns had come to see it as a prolonged rest day. The alternative was to stew in your own sweat, painfully aware that your heart and balls were trying their best to envelop your spine.
In the bridge, Captain Navathe finished her pre-take off litany. Clarke couldn’t see it, but he knew that, somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of Jagal’s spaceport, a gigantic industrial hand was hauling Beowulf from its storage position and gently pushing it to open space. When the ship’s computers reported that the distance between spaceport and the ship’s fusion engines was safe enough, the spa
ceport’s flight controllers would unlock navigation access back to Beowulf, and then they’d leave Jagal.
As the ship left the starport’s spin, gravity vanished. All around Clarke, sailors strapped themselves to their seats. He followed suit.
No going back now, Clarke said to himself. Next to him, the young contractor began to pray in a whisper.
7
Chapter Seven
Delagarza
When Delagarza caught sight of the shuttle that would take them out of the spaceport and back into Alwinter’s dome, he burst into laughter. He couldn’t help it.
“What’s so funny?” asked Krieger, a few meters ahead of him, while she cleared the departure procedure with the foreman of the enforcer’s private hangar.
“It’s just too much,” he explained, pointing at the aerodynamic, slick monster that buzzed softly in front of them. “What, are you guys planning to wage a war in Dione? Overthrow a shadow yeti government, maybe?”
“Yeti?” Krieger asked, frowning.
“Just local folklore,” Delagarza said, still smiling.
Truth was, it was only part of the joke. The shuttle, unlike a starship, was built for planet-fall and atmospheric re-entry. It was bullet shaped, with the fusion engines (no Alcubierre) at the bottom of the ship and the crew at the top.
At some point during the shuttle’s design, someone decided to make it stealthy.
Clearly, not a military design, but living proof of what happened when you gave unlimited budget to independent contractors. Stealth ships in this day and age belonged to the realm of imagination and movies. Yes, technically, the oily black surface of the shuttle could reflect radar, to a point. Delagarza harbored no doubts that the ship had bleeding edge jammers and inner systems would hide all the on-board chatter and radio noise. Hell, even the main weapon (anti-starship machine gun, .50cal depleted uranium shells) had what amounted to big silencers on its barrels.