Haven (The Orbit Series Book 2)

by J. S. Collyer

  “I’m not,” Sol pleaded, still trying to pull out of Hugo’s grip. “I swear I’m not. And you thinking that just shows how much you don’t know.”

  “Then tell us,” Webb said, turning back to the dealer. “Tell us what’s going on. We need to know.”

  “Why?” he cried. “How do I know you didn’t kill these people? Or that the Ghosts didn’t send you in to destroy all traces?”

  Dana muttered but Hugo shook the man. “Silence, everyone. Dana, back off. Webb, you know this man, yes?”

  Webb nodded.

  “Do you trust him?”

  Sol’s imploring eyes locked on Webb’s. Webb shook his head. “No. He’s a Catiline gang member. But,” he said, as Dana twitched. “I believe he’s telling the truth. He’s scared. He’s not here to cover anything up.”

  “I’m here to find proof,” the Patch dealer said, voice steadying.

  “Proof of what?” Dana said again.

  “Dana,” Jazz said softly. “We have enough of our own to go on. We should leave. Whatever this man’s business is, it’s his own.”

  Sol straightened and shouldered out of Hugo’s grip. “That’s right. Get out of here, the lot of you. Leave me to my affairs and I’ll leave you to yours.”

  Hugo looked to Webb and Webb, after a second, nodded. Hugo stepped back.

  “No,” Dana protested. “We can’t trust him. He could ruin everything.”

  “You’re not from here, are you?” Sol asked, eyes narrow and voice suddenly low and cool. Dana scowled. “I thought not. You,” he looked at Jazz. “I don’t know how you got mixed up with these Outsiders but if I was you I’d walk away from them and don’t look back. They haven’t the first clue what they’re getting caught up in and they’ll drag you down with them.”

  Jazz didn’t look at them. “What are you trying to do? I might be able to help.”

  Sol sighed, looked at the workstation and brushed a trembling hand over his worried forehead. “I can’t tell you. Not yet.”

  “Good luck to you then,” Jazz said and Sol nodded. She turned to Webb. “We’re leaving. Now.”

  Sol stood staring after them as they left. Jazz checked the corridor then waved them out. The Enforcers were stepping off one lift just as they ducked into another. A couple of confused glances was all they got from them before the doors were closing.

  “I can’t believe we left him alive,” Dana said. “He could tell anyone.”

  “He won’t,” Jazz said. “He was telling the truth.”

  “What did you find?” Hugo asked the broker but she shook her head.

  “We need to get away from here first. Sol’s not going to say anything, but if he was able to find out about this killing, others will, including whoever Celeste was working for.”

  “If they didn’t kill her themselves,” Webb muttered.

  “They didn’t,” Jazz said, meeting Webb in the eye. “Not with the Black Cross. Like you said, this is personal.”

  *

  Jazz hurried them to the rear entrance of Celeste’s building, then took them a different way back out of the district. She managed to find a way that avoided the wide and teeming walkways, but that did require them to clamber over more relay sheds, duck below ground floor windows and use Webb’s multitool to get them through a locked gate or two. It took them a lot longer but Jazz was stiff and the look on her face meant no one argued with her.

  Finally, they were back at the mopeds.

  “I’ll tell you what I found, then I have to go,” Jazz said. “I’m already late for the clinic.”

  “Jazz,” Webb started.

  “You were right, Webb,” she said coolly. “And so was Sol. This is as far as I can go with you. And you promised it would be all you would ask me for.”

  Webb throat tightened but he nodded.

  “What did you find?” Hugo said, not seeing or choosing to ignore the strings of tension tightening in the air.

  Jazz broke her locked look with Webb and glanced back at the bright spires of the Planning District. “Celeste was brokering credit that she shouldn’t have been. With what you found at Bryce’s I’d say we’re looking at a ring of bloodgrease traders, though that’s more credit than I’ve ever known anyone make from bloodgrease alone.”

  “Can you tell what was going on from the credit transfers?”

  Jazz shook her head. “All I can tell you is where the credit was going. That might be enough for you to find out everything else you need.”

  “Where was it going?” Dana said. “Sector 4 shipyard?”

  “Not just the shipyard…” Jazz said. “The Perseverance.”

  “What?” Hugo said. “The Service flagship?”

  Jazz nodded. “Celeste has it all well coded, but the credit, along with a lot of other information and communication, was all going to Sector 4 yard workers working on the Perseverance.”

  “The workers?” Webb frowned. “Workers don’t use credit.”

  “These ones do,” Jazz said, glancing at the chrono on her wrist panel. “And that is already far more than I wanted to know.”

  “They’re Ghosts,” Dana breathed. “They must be.”

  “Thank you,” Hugo said to Jazz, face grim but hand outstretched. “I do understand how much you’ve risked for us.”

  “I don’t think you do,” Jazz said, not taking his hand. There was no malice in her face or tone. Just regret. “But I hope you never have to. One last word of advice…” she looked at them each in turn. “That man, Sol, is doing the right thing. He might be involved, he might be scared, he might know too much…but he’s trying to find enough evidence to bring whatever is happening here to the Elders. I hope he manages it, though he’s in more danger than the rest of us put together. But either way, you need to watch your step. He’s doing it for the colony. You’re looking into this for yourselves.” She held up a hand as Dana bristled and Hugo stiffened. Webb was just cold with guilt. “I’m just warning you. No one will care about your vendetta. They will care that you got involved for your own reasons. Get what you need and get out as fast as you can. Whatever is happening under the surface here will break eventually and when it does, you do not want to be in the blast radius.”

  “We know,” Webb said, before the Hugos could say anything. “Thanks, Jazz. For everything.”

  She pressed her lips into a thin line for a moment then nodded. A hundred things clamoured in Webb’s head but he couldn’t bring himself to say any of them, especially with Hugo stood by with his eyes narrowed and his sister visibly itching to go.

  He sighed and took Jazz by the elbow and stepped her around the corner. She just looked at him.

  “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

  Jazz shook her head. “You’ve always made your own choices, Zeek.”

  “You think they’re bad choices.”

  The edge of a smile turned up the corner of the broker’s mouth. “Yes. Some of them. Ok, most of them. But a pilot has to chart his own course.”

  Webb nodded then leant forward and kissed Jazz on the cheek. He ignored the catch in his chest at the familiar smell of coffee and citrus and pulled away with his eyes on the ground. Jazz grabbed his hand before he could go. When Webb looked back, the calm mask had slipped and there was pain clearly burning in her face.

  “Just…survive this ok?” she asked. “And get that Ariel off my colony.”

  Webb felt a thin smile pull at his mouth. “That’s a promise.”

  *

  Webb looked flushed and pained when he came back round to Hugo and Dana at the mopeds. Hugo heard Jazz’s footsteps fade away.

  “Are you ok?”

  Webb looked at him a moment as if trying to remember where he was then his jaw tightened. “We’ve got work to do.”

  “Finally,” said Dana. “Come on. We’ve got to get out to that flagship.”

  *

  Hugo let Dana pick their route back, trusting to Webb to call her up if she took them close to well-lit or busy areas. We
bb was sombre and the set look on his face brooked no argument when he did. Despite the delays, Dana seemed to be in better spirits, face still grave but her eyes bright.

  Hugo was sure his sister felt what he did: that they were getting closer. But, unlike him, she was clearly enjoying the ride.

  When they were finally back in the bolthole, they rummaged through the storage lockers for different coveralls, kerchiefs and goggles. Dana took charge, insisting Webb looked too distinctive in a cap and helping him tie a stained dust scarf over his long black hair. Hugo was allowed to keep his cap but given welder’s goggles and a scarf to hide the bottom half of his face. They all pulled on gloves.

  Dana zipped up a welding tunic over her coveralls and wrapped a kerchief around her neck to hide the lack of brand. Hugo took a couple of disposable lenslights, though he wasn’t sure they looked up to much. Webb supplemented his own knife assortment with a nightstick he slung at his hip inside his coveralls.

  Dana insisted on checking over them all before they headed out and carried on muttering at them to slump more and not look so tense. Hugo ignored her, knowing she was mainly issuing orders as a way of keeping herself calm. It was something he knew he used to do. Webb ignored her too and they got back on the mopeds without even an exchanged glance. They struck out back the way they’d come from the refinery - back towards Sector 4.

  They had to loop round through narrow alleys away from the main thoroughfares and once stop and haul the mopeds over a fence to avoid getting too close to the refinery. Hugo had to shake away the images of blood and black crosses the whole way. He thought of Celeste in her house gown, enjoying her wine before starting at the sound of someone picking her apartment lock.

  He shook it away and told himself again that the killings were none of his concern. He was not the only enemy these people, these Ghosts, had made. He remembered the way Webb had talked about the Black Cross on Lunar 1:

  “The Black Cross is a symbol. For revenge. For retribution. For the punishment of a grievous and personal sin.”

  He remembered the eyes of the people he’d killed under it when they’d realised what was happening. Another image, stronger than any other, rose before his eyes. Webb in Doll’s basement flat on Lunar 1 before the last war. The original Webb. That day his commander had been angry and scared and determined. His face, normally so quick to smile, had been bleak and his eyes hard with purpose. He’d had a wrong he needed to right. Vincent Marlowe had to die under a Black Cross, by his hand, and know why.

  That man was dead now, but his clone carried those same memories and determination. They both knew what they were looking at when they saw a Black Cross. Someone, like them, was out for revenge. They just had to get to the heart of the secrets before the killer finished their work and silenced everyone who could tell them where to find Ariel.

  “Pull over here,” Webb said and slowed his moped, steering into the thick shadows behind a wall near the shuttle stop for the shipyard. When they cut their engines they could hear the muted roar of the yard and the rattling of shuttles on old rails. The vacuum shield was visible, the stars distant and cold in their spread of blackness.

  Hugo swung himself off his moped and they clung close to the wall, flattening themselves into shadows whenever a worker passed within sight. Dana got them right up to the shuttle rails without having to go out into the main walkways. Hugo breathed in the smells of oil, metal and bloodgrease and wondered at how familiar it was.

  A shuttle was just pulling away with a heave and a shudder when Hugo grabbed Webb’s elbow.

  “What?”

  Hugo peered into the shadows behind them, holding his breath.

  “What is it now?” Dana said.

  “There’s someone back there,” Hugo said, fingering the hilt of his knife. “Stay here. Dana, silence.”

  They obeyed though Dana twitched with impatience and Hugo crept back along the wall, not letting his steps make any noise. He got to the corner and held his breath, listening hard but all was quiet again. When he dared a glance around the corner there was nothing but shadows and billows of steam stained green from the glow of the track lights.

  “Anything?” Webb said as he appeared at this elbow.

  Hugo shook his head. “No. But I definitely heard someone.”

  Webb scanned the alley. “That’s the second time it’s felt like someone’s been tailing us.”

  “Third,” Hugo murmured.

  “Third?”

  Hugo turned to him. “When we got back from our first shift there was a man stood outside Michalski’s, watching us. I thought I saw him at the gate of the shipyard once too.”

  “What did he look like?” Webb said, visibly trying to hide his growing concern.

  Hugo closed his eyes, tried to bring up the vision of the man with the sharp eyes. “Short. Black hair. Not a worker…though I think he had something wrong with his arm.”

  Webb’s face tightened a moment before he shook his head. “That could have been anyone. Still,” he said, glancing around the drifting steam and shadows. “I don’t like this.”

  “Me neither. We need to hurry.”

  He heard nothing more, but that didn’t stop him checking over his shoulder several times as they made their way back. Dana stood poised in the shadows, arms folded.

  “Right, let’s get on that flagship,” Webb said, voice tight and eyes scanning the teeming activity of the yard.

  “We’re just going to walk right through the yard?” Hugo said doubtfully.

  Webb nodded, pointing to the section of colony hull next to the vacuum shield which was bristling with ladders, platforms and windowed hatches. “The only way onto the Perseverance without a suit is through those airlock tunnels. We don’t have drift-work passes so we need to look like we belong with the airlock teams long enough for me to hack our way through a quiet access hatch.”

  “And you can definitely do that?” Dana muttered.

  “No. But if you’ve got any other ideas, I’d love to hear them.”

  Dana scowled but said nothing and then Webb was taking a breath, tucking his hair in his headscarf and striding out over the shuttle rails. Hugo gathered himself and hurried after him.

  XI

  The foreman at the edge of the welding pits was too absorbed in his quality check to notice three figures slipping through the gates mid-shift. Webb skirted around the edges of the pits and then through the production lines, sticking to the busiest thoroughfares.

  “We’ll stick out more sneaking around the edge,” he muttered in Hugo’s ear when they got caught in a bottleneck of workers queuing for access to the airlock tunnels. “Just relax.”

  Hugo gave himself a mental shake but then cursed and pulled Webb by the elbow to jostle them deeper into the crowd.

  “What?” Webb said,

  “Lola.”

  “Who?”

  “Foreman Michalski,” Hugo clarified. She was barely five feet away, climbing off a moped, hands flicking fingerspeech at a pit worker.

  “Shit,” Webb said, looking about. “Quick, this way.”

  Hugo hung his head and followed Webb as he elbowed his way out of the crowd towards the vacuum shield.

  “This is too exposed,” Dana said as they stepped onto the platform in front of the shield.

  “Just keep moving,” Webb replied and they followed him along the platform. Giant displays suspended from a series of frames hung between the shield and the yard, scrolling schematics and production figures. Workers hurried back and forth with hand-held panels, making notes and blinking in the starlight reflected off the metal platform. The ship skeletons hung in space, silent and huge against the yawning backdrop outside the shield. The Perseverance dominated them all, her hull gleaming silver and her bulk impossibly large against the half-constructed freighters and spaceliners around her. The airlock tunnels anchoring her to the colony branched off her hull like parasitic worms.

  Hugo risked a glance back towards the pits and stiffened. “Michal
ski’s looking this way,” he said, forcing himself not to break pace.

  “Almost there,” Webb said, not looking up as they tagged onto the end of a knot of technicians moving toward the airlocks. “Can you see what she’s saying with her hands?”

  Hugo glanced back as casually as he could. “She’s gone.”

  “Christ Almighty,” Webb muttered as they slowed their pace and allowed the technicians to drift ahead. “That could cost us.”

  “Relax,” Dana said. “Even I don’t recognise you in the stupid head scarf. Just keep moving.”

  “We have to get back in the queue,” Webb muttered as they drew closer to the lines of workers. “Keep an eye out for Michalski.”

  “Wait,” Dana said as they passed one of the access ladders, reading the information display. “This tunnel goes to the Perseverance.”

  “It’s locked,” Webb said, pointing at a warning on the display. “Out of order. Come on, we’re going to be seen.”

  “Wait,” Hugo said, peering at the little display and then up the ladder to the windowed airlock hatch. “The lights are on in the tunnel.”

  “So?”

  Hugo frowned at Webb. “So, if you were accepting illegal credit for something to do with the construction a ship, wouldn’t you want your own way to access her that no one else would be using?”

  Webb frowned. “I don’t know…”

  “He’s right,” Dana said, looking around. “For once. Quick, while there’s no one looking.”

  “No,” Webb said, but Dana was already climbing. Hugo followed. “Hugo, wait! This isn’t a good…aw, damnit, I swear you Hugos will be the death of me. Again.”

  Hugo ignored the comment, satisfied to hear the younger man start climbing behind him. He surveyed the other ladders and platforms, teeming with workers, that fed the honeycomb of airlocks. The workers kept to their ordered lines, made way for each other and barely looked up. He felt like any moment everyone in the yard might turn and see them, but they somehow reached the top without incident. The platform felt even more exposed than the ladder but he concentrated on looking like he was meant to be there by keeping his shoulders loose and his eyes turned away from the yard. Dana examined the dark display next to the door.