by Lucas Bale
Yet there was an increased Peacekeeper presence in the canton, and Weaver had seen several more Caesteri that were known to him. He had barely avoided two of them himself, ducking quickly down a small passage as they strode by. Whatever its public avoidance of the truth, the Magistratus could not possibly ignore an attack on a gunship in so public a place. First the murders, now the destruction of a gunship—the Magistratus would be funnelling every resource into finding the threat. So only when he was certain he was alone and unobserved did Weaver descend the steps down to the cellar where the theatre would be found.
Calling a place like this a theatre had always seemed to him to be disingenuous. It was through art that the dissidents found their true voices. Books were no longer printed or even written—they were sought out and burned, and to possess one was to invite a severe punishment. There was no medium to create and view a motion picture drama; modules were controlled, and whatever was received through them was known to the Magistratus. So it was only through live drama and music in these clandestine places that the most compelling subversive voices were heard.
The theatres themselves were transient entities. They would move from place to place, word of mouth traveling with them to their new location. In that way they kept their existence suppressed and remained hidden from the Magistratus. Yet to many who met there, they were more than just centres for artistic expression. They functioned equally as meeting places for the exchange of revolutionary thought; places where the truth could be told and the deceit peddled by the Magistratus diluted.
The door at the bottom of the steps opened into a room Weaver had come to be very familiar with. Hidden cameras would be scanning his face, analysing it and assessing it. He wondered whether the mask—a second application of the one he had worn the night before and which had been damaged—contained any material differences the algorithms might pick up. Whether there might be a hostile welcome awaiting him in the rooms beyond.
The citizens seated at desks, working with whatever tasks they had been set by their canton, had only human eyes, and those eyes knew his face by now. They allowed him to pass unhindered through to the back of the room, to a second door which, he knew, would lead to a long, narrow corridor. At the end stood a single figure, armed with a concealed pistol, whose only task was to hold off any unwanted guests until the space behind him could be vacated and its inhabitants able to melt into the shadows of the canton. There would be more cameras here, and if there was any risk, the man would ensure he could not pass.
But no such refusal came, and soon Weaver found himself seated at a table, a plate of fried meat and boiled potatoes placed in front of him. He ate hungrily, realising it had been almost twenty-four hours since his last meal. The weight of the attack on the gunship drew on him suddenly, and he felt exhausted as the tension seeped out of his muscles. Maybe it was the taste of the food, or sitting at a table with others as they spoke, but he felt overwhelmed and weary. He closed his eyes and slowed his breathing, but his body ached.
It was only when he closed his eyes that he homed in on the chatter around him and realised what they were talking about: the attack. So, he thought. They did not believe the propaganda. Word of mouth on the walkways and galleries carried the truth unhindered.
‘You think it’s the start of something,’ a nervous voice said near him.
‘I think it’s the start of trouble, that what it is,’ the reply came.
Weaver opened his eyes and ate some more. He didn’t look towards the voices; instead, his ears now attuned to their conversation, he listened.
‘It’s been coming for a while,’ the other said.
‘It’s reckless. It will hurt the rest of us.’
‘It should be welcomed, you mean,’ a third insisted.
‘Welcomed? Are you mad? They will come down here looking for whoever did it. Increased scrutiny! Is that what you want? This place will have to move again.’
‘You always say that,’ the first replied. ‘Always want us to take the path of least resistance, no matter what they do and who they take in the middle of the night.’
‘People died. Have you forgotten that?’
Weaver felt a chill clutch his chest and tighten.
‘Yes, shot by Peacekeepers.’
‘Yes, as they tried to apprehend the terrorists.’
‘Terrorists? Is that what you think they are?’
‘That’s exactly what they are!’
A chair scuffed beside Weaver and his head snapped towards it. He found his hand on the grip of the pistol against his back, a movement he hardly realised he had made. A woman sat down in the seat next to him with a mug of hotleaf. The steam curled from the mug as the woman stirred the leaves at the bottom. She was as old as he was, maybe even a little older, with long, grey hair she had tied back into a tail. Her face bore the wrinkles of both age and heavy burdens, but her eyes were bright and alert.
‘Do you think they’re terrorists?’ she said without looking at him.
‘I don’t think about it,’ he said. ‘I just come to eat.’
She smiled slightly. ‘We all just come to eat. But we all have to think about such things. When you’ve finished, you come and tell Bren over there. He’ll bring you to me.’
Weaver was about to ask why, but the woman stood up and took her mug. He swallowed the question into a stomach that turned over as she walked away from him. He glanced down at his plate of food, then across at the men who had been speaking. They glanced back at him but showed no sign that they had overheard, or were even interested in, the conversation he had just shared.
Weaver stood and walked over to the man she had identified as Bren.
He was taken along another corridor, again guarded by a single man he assumed to be armed, and through a door into an office. There she sat behind a desk, and indicated for him to sit without looking up. Bren left them alone.
‘Not hungry?’
‘Not anymore.’
‘You’ve killed before,’ she said as she looked up and met his gaze. ‘Why should it trouble you now?’
‘You don’t know anything about me.’
‘You’ve been coming here for just over a week. You think I don’t make it my business to watch newcomers?’
‘That doesn’t mean very much.’
‘So it’s merely coincidence then that, in this canton, after a man with your bearing arrives, there is an attack on a gunship?’
‘What bearing is that?’
‘Someone who is used to violence. Don’t for one moment think I haven’t seen your type many times over the years.’
‘You’re mistaken.’
‘You only eat here,’ she said. ‘You never stay for discussions, or drama, or any of the poetry readings we have.’
‘Those things don’t matter to me.’
‘An ill-advised thing to say to your host. No, “those things”, as you call them, are the roots of freedom, and anything but frivolous. But you do listen to what others are saying. You watch everything around you with the greatest of care. You are well used to being in danger. Far more so than most who come here. And you are armed—a tremendous risk to take, even if there were good reason.’
‘What do you want from me?’
‘This is my canton,’ the woman said. ‘The citizens who live here are my people. I have lived in one or other of these tavara for nearly seventy years. The children of my family, and many other families like it, play in the parks and walkways. What you are doing will endanger the lives of everyone trying to exist here.’
‘Why do you perform these dramas, sing these dissident songs, speak these revolutionary words, if it’s all a prelude to nothing? You complain about your place in the Republic, about the Quorum and the Magistratus, but do nothing to change either. What then is the point of places like this?’
She smiled and regarded him evenly. ‘I’ve seen men like you come and go over the years. Men who think that the only way to fight this regime is head on, into the steel wa
ll surrounding it. All they want is an outlet for their violence, and they delude themselves into believing that their motives are righteous. They don’t seek change, or to secure the safety of the people who live in a canton like this. They live for the war they create. At first, they just want to feel as though they are doing something—and fighting back fulfils that desire—but soon they become addicted to the guns and the explosions and the game they have created: staying ahead of their enemy, outwitting them. They give no thought to the consequences of their war, or what it might do for the people who are left behind when they themselves are killed. They have no intention of saving anyone; all they intend is to assuage their own resentment through yet more bloodshed. Before long, those men are no better than any Peacekeeper or Caestor.’
Weaver was losing patience. ‘And how are you any different?’ he said. ‘You sit on your wooden throne and preside over this little fiefdom of yours, but the truth is, you do nothing to change it either. Your acquiescence is as culpable as their mindless violence.’
‘I protect the people around me and give them hope.’
‘Hope fades when oppression remains.’
‘Violence is not the only way to achieve an objective. Don’t mistake satyagraha for conformity and acceptance.’
Weaver sighed and stood. ‘If you have nothing more to say…?’
She stared him, her face expressionless. Then her eyes narrowed. ‘My first duty is to these people,’ she said. ‘If you threaten them with your war, I won’t stand by and do nothing.’ She rose from her seat. ‘I don’t expect we shall see each other again. Bren will see you out.’
C H A P T E R 43
THE CRATES were directly behind those steel walls, she knew that. She had to hand it to Shepherd—the concealed compartments were almost invisible, even when she knew they were there. He had to have paid a handsome sum to get them made. Found someone really good, then paid them a little more to keep quiet afterwards.
Natasha was alone in the hold. She’d hit the lights as she’d entered and the whole place was flooded in cool, white light. The sound of her footsteps echoed first on the steel grating, then hummed over the high ceiling. It was an eerie place, empty and quiet. All the more so because the ship knew she was down here. She felt a cool sweat gathering on her face and her heart continued to beat way too fast. Her muscles had been aching ever since they left the camp and she’d had to lift a stash of curatives from Soteria’s medical bay when no one was looking. The nausea would start soon, and with it abdominal cramps, and then she really would be fucked. Focus, she told herself. Get on with it while you can.
She scanned the high corners of first the loading bay, then the hold, finding the cameras that fed images to the bridge. She had shut them all off before she came down here, then shut off the alert system that would tell Shepherd the hold had been accessed. He was in his quarters right now, getting some sleep while they burned through the tunnel. She’d heard him dreaming as she’d passed by, checking on him to make sure he was asleep. Choked, almost incomprehensible words, accompanied by soft, murmured cries. Not dreams of the good kind. Everyone has their demons.
There were lockers in one corner, and she opened each of them until she found a toolbox. From it, she retrieved a chisel and took it over to the compartments. Shepherd had made everyone leave when he sealed the compartments—he still wanted to keep his secrets—so she would have to experiment to find a way to get them open. In the end, it proved to be easier than she thought. As the first panel came away, she caught it deftly, then rested it gently on the steel grating.
She did the same with the remaining panels, until all the compartments were open. She flashed a luminant inside, panning across the crates within. Long, heavy crates for industrial machine parts. Crates whose licences said they should be empty, ready to receive butchered parts from dead ships on Raznaris. But the actual empty crates were secured in plain sight over in one corner of the hold; and these crates sure as hell weren’t empty. Natasha didn’t know who would be picking up whatever was inside, but if Bashar was involved, they would be as black as soot.
She knocked on one, knowing there would be no hollow echo. She studied the outside, the cladding and the locking system. No way to get into it without brute force or the crux. She stepped back and considered her options. There didn’t look to be any way to open the crates without making it obvious they’d been tampered with. She jammed the chisel on one side, took a hammer, and knocked it in until it was halfway to the neck. She levered until she heard a crack, then levered some more. The top of the crate fell away, dropping loudly to the back of the compartment.
She shone the light from the luminant into the crate, but all she could see was black wool. A blanket. The tang of oil and metal filled the compartment.
Is it really machine parts? That’s all it is?
She reached down and pulled the blanket away. When she saw the contents of the crate, she flinched. Shit.
The crate was stacked with heavy Peacekeeper rifles. They were running guns.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
The voice shocked her enough that she staggered backwards. She turned towards Shepherd. He was standing in the hold behind her, the harsh white light picking out the furious creases of the anger in his face. She tensed.
‘You need to see this,’ she said.
‘I don’t want to see a damn thing,’ he replied. ‘Put the lid back.’
‘We’re running guns,’ she said. ‘What the hell are we taking guns to Raznaris for?’
Shepherd huffed. ‘The boy put us in this position. Let’s just make the drop and get out.’ He turned away, but she caught hold of him by the arm.
‘Stop laying this on the boy. Bashar put us in this position, not him. You need to stop blaming everyone for the shit you’re in and realise it was coming no matter what.’
Shepherd gave her a look, then dropped his gaze down to her hand on his arm. She took it away. He walked slowly over to the crates and glanced inside. His face pinched. ‘Damn,’ he muttered.
‘My thoughts exactly.’
‘It was never going to be easy. We better go wake the preacher.’
But the preacher wasn’t sleeping. He came with them to the hold wordlessly. He looked into the crate first, then knelt and took out one of the rifles. Shepherd seemed about to protest, but instead he shook his head and turned away muttering.
‘They’re not new,’ the preacher said as he examined the rifle. ‘But they’re well maintained. They haven’t been stored for long—they’ve been looked after. They were stolen from an active unit, not from a storage facility.’
‘Does it matter?’ Shepherd said. ‘Who gives a shit where they were stolen from? Don’t ask questions, just do the run. That’s the rule out here, preacher. What matters now is we need to be damn careful when we hand these over. And we need to put that crate back so they don’t have a clue we know what’s inside.’
Not much chance of that, Natasha thought.
‘We need to know who we’re delivering this to,’ the preacher said.
Natasha shook her head. ‘He’s right, preacher. It’s not our business. We hand the crates over and we’re even with Bashar. Then we get on with the real job.’
‘It won’t be that easy,’ Shepherd said. ‘We’re going to have to be ready.’
Raznaris was no more than a bleak rock in the sterile dark of space. A graveyard for the empty husks of expired ships; a dead planet whose only redeeming feature was the perfect gravity it offered the process of hauling their colossal hulls. It was too far from the system’s only star to be warm enough to work in without a suit. The atmosphere had not been terraformed, and it was so thin—a handful of diaphanous layers—that the sky was almost the colour of slate and shed a perpetual twilight across a craggy, lunar landscape.
But the Magistratus had been frugal when they’d built the spider’s web of shipyards, machine shops, and storage hangars on the planet’s surface. The resulting
vast, sealed complex was in truth no more than one, endless industrial plant. It was contained within an artificial biosphere connected by tunnels built into trenches in the rock, and the graveyard, where they stored the wrecks to be scrapped, sprawled over a charcoal desert too huge to measure.
Visitors to Raznaris tended to be of a certain type. The only reason to come out here was to negotiate a salvage for a ship to be scrapped, or to scavenge parts cannibalised from the creaking hulls of the dead. So the complex was full of freighter-tramps, salvors, and grease monkeys—anyone who might have a need for replacement parts to patch up an ailing ship. Freight contracts were only loosely monitored, and the Bazaar had found ways to insinuate itself into positions where they could allow spacecraft assigned to the smelting caverns, and their on-board technology, to covertly find their way out of Raznaris. Most suspected the Magistratus allowed such things to pass because they needed the black market to exist—to fulfil a need they were unwilling to fulfill themselves. Raznaris was, in truth, a place where the clandestine removal of spacecraft could be easily monitored, and the true artifice came later in the skill of concealing a ship’s identity—in creating new markings for it, and a history that would replace its old one.
And Bashar’s men had done their job well. Soteria’s new markings and her freight contract documentation had been passed through by a taciturn customs official who had assigned her a landing platform on the outskirts of the estate, far enough away from the rest of the complex that they would not be disturbed. Bashar was connected enough to organise that too, Natasha thought.
‘They’ll be waiting for us,’ she said. ‘Whoever is collecting will already be here. Bashar planned this in advance.’