Breakaway

by Michelle Diener

  She whipped around to see what it was, but it was too dark.

  “Most likely a curban,” Leo said, stepping up close and looking over her shoulder.

  “What's that?”

  He tilted his head to her in surprise. “About this big.” He showed her with his hands. “Snub nose, fine scales. They'll bite if cornered, but they'd rather run away.”

  “You've seen them up close?”

  “I grew up on the mines, and they're everywhere there.” He drew her in, so her back was to his chest, and hugged her to him.

  She settled in, content for the moment, and looked upward.

  The lights of Tether Town and Felicitos usually obscured the night sky, but out here, the stars were almost overwhelming in their brightness, the sheer number of them lighting up the galaxy.

  “My mother was a prospector.” Leo's voice was a rumble in her ear. “She was part of the first wave, when the Core Five were just setting up. They'd claimed the main ore bodies, fighting with each other and eventually settling on a compromise of who got what, carving it up among themselves, but there were still small claims that a few people could work and make a good living on. The trick was picking the right one.”

  “And did your mother pick the right one?” Sofie tilted her head back but Leo was looking up at the sky.

  He nodded. “She found a small seam, worked it herself until I was old enough to help her. But it only lasted six years before we needed special equipment to get whatever was left out.”

  She didn't say anything, letting him stand quietly for a moment.

  “The equipment was available, for rent or for sale, but it was owned by the Cores. They set the price and let's just say it was one we couldn't afford.” He rubbed her arm, almost unconsciously. “I'd been working that claim with my mom since I was fourteen, and we were looking at packing it in.”

  She could hear the bleak fury in his voice.

  “What happened?”

  “My mom took a Cores job, just a short term, year-long contract, to get us enough to rent the equipment and open the mine again.” His hold on her tightened a little, then relaxed. “The seam she was working two months before her contract ended collapsed. She and twenty others died that day.”

  She turned in his arms, pulled him close to her with her arms around his waist. “I'm so sorry.”

  “They killed your father, too.” His voice was steady.

  She let that go, because in many ways her father was her father in name only. Whereas it sounded as if Leo and his mother had been a team.

  “When she died, I wanted to kill the Cores.”

  She heard the depth of feeling in his voice.

  They stood there for long minutes and eventually she shifted.

  “What about this story has you worried about my reaction, Leo? Nothing you've said so far has done anything but make me admire you more.”

  “It's what happened next.” He turned her around again, drew her in, his arms wrapped around her shoulders as if he couldn't quite face her while he spoke. “They didn't even tell me she'd died. I got worried when I hadn't heard from her and I went up to the mine site. Someone flicked through a screen and gave me the news like they were giving me a weather report.”

  She gripped his hands where they rested on her collarbone. Squeezed.

  “I was so angry. Enraged.” He rubbed his chin on the top of her head. “I went back to Phansi and stewed. I watched a transport leave, and then I got together some supplies, went out to the route, and waited for it to come back from Tether Town. And I took it.”

  She stilled. “And you lived to tell the tale?”

  “I forced the driver and the guards out, and they watched me fly away with it. I'd set it all up in advance. I crested a hill, set off a big explosion, and all anyone found were parts of other transports that had been damaged in hijacks over the years. I'd collected them up and scattered them to make it look like most of a transport. Then I rewired the hover I'd taken to emit a new ID.”

  “And Gaudier Transports was born.”

  His nod brushed his chin against her cheek.

  “I waited out on the plateau for three months, giving the Cores time to forget, then I flew it back into Phansi and told everyone I'd inherited money from my mother's estate, and had bought a beat up transport with it.”

  “What did you do with the ore?”

  He shook his head. “There was no ore. I attacked the transport on the way back to Phansi, not going the other way. They weren't as attentive with no ore to protect, and the Cores weren't as angry about the loss when there was no ore missing.”

  “What about your partners in the heist?”

  He gave a humorless laugh. “There were no partners. It was a solo job. Looking back now, I know the only reason I pulled it off at all is because I did do it solo. The driver would never have stopped if I hadn't been alone, looking like I was hiking back to Phansi. That was how I got the jump on them. They never saw my face, it was winter, bitterly cold, and my face was covered.”

  “And then they thought you died in the explosion.”

  He shrugged. “I don't know if I fooled the transport crew, but I didn't hurt them, I left them alive, and it might have been easier just to say the whole thing had gone up in a ball of flames. My guess is they embellished the whole thing, out of embarrassment at being taken by a single person. They probably told the Cores it was a gang and they were overwhelmed. They would have been worried about admitting to anything less.”

  He was silent, and she had the feeling he was finally coming to the crux of the situation, the thing that had him sure she was going to be unhappy with him.

  It made her feel like she'd swallowed rocks. She wanted to get this done. “So now you had a transport.”

  “I had a transport, but no ore to transport in it.” His voice was soft now. “The prospectors in Phansi are a close knit group. They can never compete with the Cores, and early on they made a decision not to do each other down. It works better if they support each other--no one else is going to.” He straightened up, dropped his arms, and she turned to look at him, but he faced away from her, eyes on the stars.

  “You wanted them to use your transport.” That made sense.

  “I wanted them to use my transport,” he agreed. “Prospectors have to put their ore through a weigh station so the Cores can evaluate how much they've mined. They have to pay a service fee based on the tonnage price, the so-called royalty to the Cores for opening up Garmen and allowing them to come prospect. They can then sell their ore to whichever company they like. The Cores always fill their transports with their own ore first, so only if there's room for extra can the prospectors sell to them, and often, the Cores demand a discount, so the prospectors try to avoid using them.”

  “So you were in with a good chance.” She knew about the weigh station at Phansi. Her father had designed it and supervised its building. He'd even gone back when Felicitos was nearing completion to upgrade it, as it had been running by then for six years.

  “The problem was I didn't have the money to pay the prospectors for their ore up front, and I didn't have the contacts to sell the ore even if I got it to Tether Town. And the threshold for getting into the game had been set so high, I was starting to realize I might not get in.”

  “But you did.”

  She was starting to realize that whatever he'd done to make himself a player was at the heart of this.

  “I did.” He paused, and his hands fisted. “I knew all the prospectors, I'd been working with them since I was fourteen, but since our claim was mined out and my mother had gone to work for the Cores, we missed the start of something new, something we weren't included in because of our circumstances.

  “When I arrived back in Phansi with my stolen transport, a little feral after my three months in the mountains, I was suddenly the solution to a problem they'd been sitting on for two weeks.” He scrubbed a hand over his head. “The next weigh-in was coming up, and they needed a co-conspirat
or they trusted, because they were all cheating the system.”

  Sofie frowned. “How were they cheating the system? And all of them?”

  He glanced at her, and then away. “All of them, because the way the cheat worked, everyone had to be in on it. The fact that the community was so tight worked in their favor. They knew no one was likely to blab to the Cores. My mother would have been in it, too, if our stake had still been producing ore.”

  “They decided to trust you.”

  “I was part of the prospector community. The other transport companies were all outside contractors, coming in to make money off the Cores if they could, and branching out to buy ore from the prospectors when they saw there was a market. There was no way the prospectors were going to tell any of them their secret. They were desperate by the time I showed up. I was familiar to them, and with a transport all ready to go.”

  “What was the cheat?” Her heart leapt at the notion of the independent miners cheating the Cores. She hoped it was by a lot.

  “The weigh station scales had been recalibrated. Made to under-read the weight by twenty percent, although the algorithm was set to decrease slowly over a few months, so it looked like the mines were just getting less viable, which the Cores already thought they would, or they wouldn't have sold the mining rights in the first place.”

  “But how . . .?” The Cores would surely keep a close watch on the weigh station figures, it was pure profit for them, a way to squeeze the last drop of money out of ore deposits they'd already all but exhausted.

  Leo looked at her, face grim. “Your father.”

  She frowned. “My father?”

  “He set the algorithm in place, he sold the scheme to the prospectors. He set up the channel to buy their ore, both the secret twenty percent and the declared amount, and he sold it on to exporters in Tether Town.”

  She knew her mouth was hanging open.

  Her father had been bitter at the Cores for ignoring how the smugglers--the murderers of his people--were hiding from justice by using Garmen as a safe haven. She thought the secret passageways and tunnels of Felicitos had been his revenge. But recalibrating the Phansi weigh station scales seemed such a strange . . . “Money,” she said, on an exhale.

  “Money,” Leo agreed. “He had a transport. He'd somehow coded it as independent, even though I'm sure he'd requisitioned it from a Cores warehouse, and he was selling twenty percent of all non-Cores ore at full price to off-planet buyers, even though it was royalty free, and splitting the extra profit fifty-fifty with the prospectors.”

  “It was to finance the secret passageways in the Under Deck.” Sofie knew her father had used Cores funds for most of the secret work that had gone into the Lower and Upper Reaches, and the tunnels out of the tower, but the Under Deck had been all his.

  “Maybe the Cores started looking at his costings a little too closely,” Leo agreed. “He needed a new way to fund what he was doing. And then, he died.”

  “So the prospectors wanted you to . . . take over from him?”

  Oh, she was starting to understand.

  He hesitated. “Yes. They were offering me the second transport, the one he'd coopted, and the secret twenty percent of ore.”

  “So you took over my father's business.” Why had her father never said anything about it?

  Leo shook his head. “I couldn't do that. I didn't have the codes to get into his accounts, and I could hardly show up and take over whatever office he was using to run the trades, but I took over the transport, and started trading the ore myself. No one ever came to me to demand a piece of the action.”

  “Because no one knew he was the one running it.”

  He gave a nod. “In the beginning, I was working so hard, running on nerves, waiting to be called out or caught out, and I was getting a thirty percent split of profits from the prospectors until I could start paying them for their ore upfront. But it didn't take long to work my way up to fifty-fifty.” He finally held her gaze. “What I didn't do is look to see if Ronald Fadal had any family. I was young, I was ambitious, and I was making serious money, and sticking it to the Cores at the same time. I didn't try and find out if Fadal had dependents who were suddenly in trouble because of his death.”

  “You started living the high life. Building warehouses, fancy houses, and renting space in the Upper Reaches, while Rach and I had to scrounge for work and count every penny.” She saw the road his mind had gone down.

  He rubbed his upper lip. “You said some of the prospectors sought you out, that they told you stories about Phansi. But they never mentioned you to me, I swear, although that's no excuse on my part. After the blur of the first few months, where I negotiated deals without really knowing what I was doing, and ran two transports full of undeclared ore to Tether Town, I should have come looking. I should have asked who had the right to come knocking and ask me what the hell I was doing with Fadal's transport, but if it occurred to me, it didn't stay in my head for long.”

  “I would never have come knocking, because I didn't know anything about his little side deal.” She gave a dry laugh. “I didn't even know if he'd been paid by the Cores. I thought they might be cheating him of his salary before he died, because there was no money, ever. When he died and Rach and I got his final payout, we saw he had been paid, he was just spending it as fast as it came in. I never knew where that money went until I saw those passageways in the Under Deck. But his salary wouldn't have been enough to pay for everything we saw there. It makes sense that he'd organized another income stream. And it would have satisfied him immensely that he was doing it at the Cores' expense.”

  “Did the prospectors help you?” Leo asked.

  She thought back to those days, to the hard-eyed men and women who'd sought her and Rach out in the coffee houses or taverns of Tether Town. “Some.” She nodded slowly. “They'd pay for our drinks or our meal. And sometimes I'd find ports in my pocket or under my plate. It confused us.” It was coming back to her now. “It didn't last long. It went on for maybe six months, a year, after my father died, then it faded out. They stopped coming around, or we looked more settled, maybe, and they let well enough alone.” She shrugged. “Maybe they thought that keeping it up would raise questions they didn't want to answer, what with that fifty-fifty split, and all.”

  Leo winced. “Maybe.”

  “So, what would you have done?” Sofie asked. “If your conscience had pricked you enough to find us?”

  “I don't know.” He slid his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “I honestly don't know, and that bothers me. When I think of you doing it hard, struggling, while I and most of Phansi got rich, I want to punch the younger me in the face.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “Those prospectors who came to see me, the ones you're thinking were so noble? My guess is they didn't tell you about us because they were scared you would have done something. That you would have insisted on cutting us in.”

  He went still. Gave a slow nod. “Maybe. I don't know if they were right.”

  “I do.” She stepped up to him, put her arms around his waist again. She liked that he slid his arms around her with no hesitation. “My father never gave us anything, not even food on the table most of the time. He was secretive, obsessive, and driven by his own demons. If he'd meant us to benefit from what he'd set up in Phansi, he had every opportunity to do so. But he didn't. When he died, nothing changed for us because we were forced to look after ourselves long before then. That you're feeling guilty about not helping us when he obviously didn't is more than a little telling about the difference between the two of you.”

  “I will make it up to you,” Leo said, his lips brushing the tip of her ear.

  “Oh, I'll make sure you do.” She laughed as she tipped her face up. Then went still at the look she saw in his eyes.

  “You really don't blame me, do you?” He slid his hands into her hair, twining his fingers through it as if to anchor her in place.

  She shook her head an
d then made a sound of approval as his lips slanted over hers.

  “I think this calls for a celebration.” His grin was wicked against her lips.

  She gave a squeak as he swung her up and then sat down on the rock, holding her in his arms.

  It felt right.

  She closed her eyes as yet another reason to stay tighten around her, tethering her to Garmen. She had never believed, as Rach had, that there would be consequences for the Cores if the stories of suffering her sister had worked so hard to obtain got out, but she'd spent the last year working towards doing it anyway, as a tribute to Rach.

  Now, as Leo's hands worked their way under her shirt and he nuzzled her neck, she found it harder to call up the desire to leave.

  Chapter 23

  “So.” Sofie shifted uncomfortably beside him, and Leo lifted her off the hard, cold rock and draped her over his chest.

  She was startled into silence for a moment, and then made a contented hum, threaded her fingers into his hair and tucked her head under his chin.

  The warmth he suddenly felt was from far more than just her body heat.

  They had dressed again, but the night air was getting colder, and they would soon need to go back to the fire, and the warmth of their sleeping bags.

  “Now that you've admitted to living the high life off my legacy, do you want to tell me why we're racing to Phansi?” There was humor in her voice.

  It still amazed him that she didn't seem to hold it against him that he'd taken her father's scheme and not given a thought to her and her sister. She thought it was a joke, was already teasing him about it.

  He hadn't realized how heavy the burden of guilt he'd been carrying was until she'd cut it away.

  “The reason we're going up there is the algorithm has reset.”

  She lifted her head. “Let me get this straight, you tell me about secret money just as it comes to an end?”

  He saw the flash of laughter in her eyes, shook his head at her. “To be fair, I only heard it had come to an end this morning.” He tucked her head back under his chin. He liked it there. “This outcome isn't going to ruin me. I'll make less without the royalty free twenty percent obviously, but I've got a fully operational, legitimate business now. I've been selling the other eighty percent this whole time, and I've bought mines of my own. I've gone after the rare mineral sands and ores that the Cores didn't think about until it was too late.”