"At least you'll be earning real wages now." Benson visibly summoned the conviction to hold up his smile. He lowered his voice. "My contract's up in three years. Once it's done, I'll blow the whistle. No more contract bids. No more care debts. Until then? All you have to do is survive. And that's what you do best."
The waiter returned with their coffee, apologizing for its lateness. Out in the streets, jukes wandered back and forth, confused. Ced knew he should say something, but he felt glued to his chair. He didn't know if he could find the strength to stand again.
* * *
They assigned him to a captain named Tartabull. Ced was their youngest crewman by four years and he bunked with three men about twenty years old who always reeked of grog and the chemical tang of vapors and smokes. The bunkhouse was tucked into a rundown apartment several blocks from the South Street tower.
First day on the crew, Tartabull called him into his office. The room was smaller than the one Ced had been granted as CEO of the Iguanas. The walls looked damp. The air smelled like sweat and fried curd.
"To the jukes, you were some kind of hero." The crew captain was light-skinned, with a red scar running down his left eyebrow and the left side of his nose. "Congratufuckinglations. You're in the big leagues now. You know who cares about what you did before? You, and your momma. Around here, the rules are simple. You do what you're told. You watch each other's backs. Or you die."
"Yes, sir," Ced said.
The man laced his fingers together on top of his desk. "I hear you got experience in the street."
"Six years. But it was only in the jukes."
Tartabull searched his face for sarcasm. "You'll need it. I'm putting you on the corner of Tenth and Doggins."
He knew the area. It was Spartans turf, just beyond the neighborhood the Iguanas had claimed with the grapefruit trick. "Doing?"
"Opening up new markets. You're the tip of the knife. Stay sharp."
On his way back to his room, the briefing appeared on his device. He was a street dealer. That didn't bug him. People wanted the stuff, so you sold it. What bothered him was that he wasn't a knife. He was a lamb. If they posted him on the corner to do business right in the open, he'd draw attention from the Spartans. They would have knives. And after the bite the Dragons had already taken out of their territory, Ced had no doubt they'd use them.
Two of his three bunkmates snored like a freighter with a loose nozzle, but he wouldn't have gotten much sleep anyway. They'd given him a death sentence. Putting him on the corner would force the Spartans into taking him out. Which sounded crazy, except by coercing the Spartans into corpsing him, the Dragons would gain a ton of weight if the poles stepped in to arbitrate.
Normally, no captain would sacrifice a crewman like that. It was too cold, flew in the face of the brotherhood they idealized to keep the lower ranks in check. But Ced's death wasn't a bug. It was a feature.
He got up early. Dressed. Went to the dining room and made himself swallow a few bites of curd.
One of the other crewman, a middle-aged man named Ecko, handed him a plastic pack. "You read the briefing?"
"Front to back," Ced said.
"Ten per pop. Or five for forty. Press the fact this is less than at the Spartans' stores—and better quality, too. Someone challenges you on that one, toss 'em a freebie. Do that, though, and you better take a snap of their face and make damn sure they pay the next time. Got it?"
"What if the Spartans come around?"
Ecko shrugged. "Blink those wide eyes of yours and tell 'em you thought the border was the next block over."
It was a cool morning. The streets smelled like steam. The corner of Tenth and Doggins faced rows of vintage bars, the signs and fronts decorated with pictures and scrap from the fighting ships of yore. A little divey, but that actually helped bring in the tourists.
Heart hammering in his ears, he went to work, declaring his wares in a low, steady chant. His prices were low and his product was good. With each sale, he transferred payment from their card to his Dragon-provided device, then passed over a small plastic packet. He moved as fast as he could, keeping one eye on the street at all times.
Mid-morning, a man cut through the crowds, a green scarf fluttering from one wrist. He caught Ced's eye and shook his head slowly. Ced raised a hand in greeting.
The man reached into his pocket. "You know whose block you're about to bleed on?"
Ced bowed his head. "The Dragons are coming for you."
The man's eyes narrowed, mouth quirking with something between wariness and contempt. "Is that a threat?"
"Friendly warning." He dropped his bag at the man's feet and moved off the corner. "Give 'em hell."
He took off at a jog. The Spartan crewman took two confused steps after him, then turned and went for the bag. Ced beelined for the nearest tube stop, hopping a train for the port. As the train hummed along, he took out his device and transferred the drug money to a blank card. One they wouldn't be able to shut down. Finished, he tossed his device under the seat.
It wasn't enough money to get to Earth. It might not be enough to get out of Uranus. Didn't matter. He'd take the first flight he could and figure things out on the way. If he could survive on the Locker's streets, he could survive anywhere.
He could have bought a ticket through his device, but that would have made it far too easy to track. The tube came to a stop and he climbed the stairs to the port. The glossy building churned with people. He found an empty screen and checked the flights. The shuttle to Ariel left in forty minutes. Maybe he could hang out in the bathroom until the last call for boarding—
A hand gripped his shoulder. He whirled. A Red Man fell back half a step, holding a small white tube in his free hand.
Ced made no attempt to run.
* * *
"Do you understand the severity of your crime?" Admiral Garnes wasn't frothing or screaming. Instead, he sounded…satisfied. Ced found that more troubling than if the man had been red-faced and swearing. "Desertion. Again. You could be airlocked for this."
"Go for it."
"Perhaps it was a mistake to let you get away with it the first time. It made you think there are no consequences for disobedience. Then again, perhaps the fault isn't mine, but yours."
"Why do I have the feeling that's your motto?"
"This is the intrinsic problem of taking on orphans. You believe you have nothing more to lose. I'm tempted to eject you into the vacuum and prove you wrong. You'll serve as fine motivation for the others."
Ced snorted. "Motivation to put a knife in your back."
The admiral sighed. "Yes, and I'm sure such a scheme would succeed just as well as all your others. I do hate to waste assets, however. And I think I have something that will provide a more subtle form of motivation. From here on out, you're off the crews. Instead, you will serve as my secretary."
"Fuck you."
"You're supposed to be clever. You will serve me, and you will do so without treachery or complaint. Do you know why?"
"Because you're delusional?"
"Because you do have someone you care about. Someone who is, at this very moment, in the most vulnerable position a person can be in." He lifted his index finger and pointed it straight up toward the ceiling. "At the whims of the vacuum. Machinery. Radiation. And her foes. Given such an array of threats, it would come as no surprise if she were to succumb to one of them."
He grabbed the edge of the desk, ready to vault it. "If you hurt her, I will kill you."
"I am sure you will try. Succeed or fail, she will still be dead."
Every nerve and organ in his body insisted he throw himself across the desk and strangle the admiral. It wasn't just for Kansas. But because, once again, the old man had won.
* * *
In one sense, the job was the easiest he'd ever had. He sat behind a desk, fielded calls, and turned a great many people away. His biggest responsibility was making sure the admiral's schedule was never double-booked.
In another sense, the job was the hardest of his life. Every day, he was on display to those who came to see the man who'd broken him. Every day, he took orders from that man. Whenever news came in from the junior crews, he was reminded how he'd failed them.
He rarely needed to leave the Dragons' tower. Some days, he did anyway, wandering the streets, feeling the pulse of the pedestrian traffic, absorbing the lights of the station ceiling and the neon signs. A few months in, he went to a doctor for a body scan, but the woman didn't find any bugs. He saved his money for weeks—he was given a stipend for incidentals—and went to a white room. They checked him head to toe with bleeding edge gear, but they didn't find anything, either. Then how was it that, every time he tried to run, the Red Men brought him back?
He turned fourteen. He kept himself going with the thought of Benson's promise to blow the whistle. At the end of his first year on the desk, his care debt was higher than when he'd started.
In time, he grew numb to the stares of former juke members, to the condescension dripping from every word Admiral Garnes spoke to him. Ced knew it was only a matter of time.
Benson's contract ran out. Ced waited, but he never came. In the news, there was no mention of care debts, contract bidding, or scandal.
Probably, Benson had run away, to the pirates in the Belt or to a quiet life on Earth. Ced wanted to be angry, but he couldn't blame him. This was, in the end, the final lesson: there was no victory. Not against a force as big as the crews. They owned trade. The poles. The entire Locker. Against that, the only thing you could do was bide your time until you could walk away.
So that was what he would do.
In eighteen months, he would turn eighteen years old. His first contract would be up. By then, he'd need to work for at least a decade before his care debt was clear. But he'd already been with the crew for close to ten years. Another ten wouldn't be so bad. Not if it meant getting away clean.
One day at a time, he drifted toward his contract's end.
Nine months later, a woman walked into reception unannounced. Her blond hair was swept back in a pompadour and she was much taller and well-built than he remembered. But there was no mistaking the lightness of her eyes, or the hardness of her cheeks.
He rose from his desk. "Kansas?"
She glanced at him, reaching inside her jacket. She paused. A smile jerked across her face. "They put you on a desk? And you let them?"
"Didn't have much choice."
"You always have a choice, fool." She ran her hand over her hair. "Actually, this makes things easier. Is the admiral in?"
"Yeah, but—"
Kansas strode to the office door and pulled it open. Ced followed her in. Admiral Garnes rose from his desk, face reddening.
"I'm sorry, Admiral," Ced said. "I couldn't stop her."
"What's up, Admiral?" Kansas waved with her left hand. With her right, she drew a gun and shot him in the head.
11
In Thor Finn's experiences, a plan almost never went off as intended.
According to some of his critics (including those on his advisory staff), that was because of his alleged habit of underestimating the intelligence of his rivals. If anything, he thought he tended to give his foes too much credit. Most people? Dumb as a penis. If you operated on the assumption they 1) were motivated by the basest urges possible (greed, envy, fear, etc.), and 2) would attempt to satisfy those urges through the most slothful, unimaginative methods before them, then nine times out of ten, you'd approach a situation with a pretty good read on where it was headed.
The fact that this wasn't true in practice, and that lots of his plans failed anyway, wasn't a fault in the People Being Penis-Heads theory. It was proof the theory was too accurate. Each person involved in a situation compounded it with their own dumbness and venality. As these forces built up, they gathered the density of a black hole, from which no reason or logic could escape.
End result? No matter how good your plan was—how carefully calculated it was to take advantage of your enemy's stupidity—it would be foiled when that enemy did something dumber than you could have possibly imagined.
It was with great satisfaction, then, that he watched the Locker's birds of prey close on the caravan of unpiloted drone freighters.
"You look happy," Iggi Daniels said beside him.
This day, her hair was a radioactive shade of pink, a whip-thin braid looped over her forehead. It was rare they met in person, but she placed a baffling interest in the scrabbling of the Locker. For his money, they were nothing but rats. Rats who fed on the hard work of honest people.
There was one upside to dealing with rats, though. When storms came, they had a happy tendency to drown.
He shrugged one shoulder high. "Happy's my default setting. The reason you rarely see it is because everyone else is so disappointing."
"Aha. There's the lecture I was expecting."
"I didn't come here to drop a wisdom-bomb on you." On the tactical display, the Locker ships, which were actually headed in the same direction as the freighters—but more slowly, allowing themselves to be caught up to—verged into the green sphere surrounding their targets. The sphere that meant the fun was about to begin. "To do that, I'd need to understand what the hell you're thinking."
"I'd try to explain if I thought you had any interest in listening."
She had an annoying way of saying things like that while making them sound a fraction as mean as they were. That made it hard to respond in kind without sounding like a total ass. Whatever. As long as she was on board with the big picture, he'd suffer her quirks.
The pirate squadron, now firmly within the green sphere, spread out. It was an obviously aggressive maneuver, a corralling tactic. Only the most passive of drones wouldn't respond with equal aggression, all but tearing themselves apart to escape. Instead, the freighters barely budged course, yet the Locker fighters continued with their unsuspecting approach. See? So focused on the prize they were blind to the simplest of traps.
The first salvo of rockets seared from the pirates' bows.
"Okay, I'm ready to be enlightened," Thor blurted. "How is this not overkill?"
Iggi laughed out loud, glancing his way. "You're telling me about overkill, Mr. Assassination?"
"I do what I do in order to reduce the number of problems in our lives. This here, though, is inefficient. We don't need this asset. We've got the strength to roll over the System as is."
"You know damn well that resource management is about more than accumulating strength. It's also about denying resources to those who could threaten you with them."
"You mean keeping the Locker out of the hands of the Hive."
"I knew the others were wrong when they said you only got your seat through nepotism."
He gave her a hard look. "Valiant was founded by your great-grandfather."
"Great-grandpappy the doctor. He thought the future lay within the human body. I'm the one who kicked us out into the only future that matters: the vacuum."
"Brilliant move, figuring out exactly what the rest of us have been proving for decades." He smiled at himself. She licked her lips, chambering her next snipe. He moved on before she could fire back. "So how is this supposed to secure us the Locker?"
"We've been through this like fifty times."
"The debts? That, I get. But you appear to have moved on to murdering them. In my experience, this tends to make people less interested in cooperating with you."
For the last few seconds, the freighters and pirates had been engaged in the standard tussle of missiles and counter-missiles. Pretty boring shit. Tactics Thor hoped to soon render obsolete. As the Locker's ships came ever nearer, though, the freighters just…fell apart. Without being struck.
Each of the dozens of pieces were nearly identical in size. Unnatural, that. Almost as if they weren't chunks of blown-up debris, but were, in fact, independent, mobile entities.
The newly-revealed swarms of military drones swung on the pirates, enf
olding them in an inescapable net of rockets.
Watching the display, Iggi raised her palms to chin height and clapped. "Oh, that's just too good. Now let's assume for a second I'm not an idiot. Then why would I be killing these fine crewmen?"
"Because," he said, seizing on the answer, "someone else in the Locker wants them dead."
"Attaboy!" She thrust her fists above her head. "And that someone is about to owe me big time."
On the screen, the first of the pirate vessels went up in the voluminous explosion of a vessel carrying an oxygenated atmosphere. The others followed like a string of lights being popped by a young boy with a hammer. She was smarter than he thought, wasn't she? He eyed her sidelong. Young. Good body. Suppose it was as flexible as her morals?
"What?" she said.
"Nothing." He nodded at the screen, where bulbs of flame were fading into the ether. "So how shall we celebrate, Blackbeard?"
12
The shot was an understated puff of air. Admiral Garnes' head snapped back. Blood sprayed the wall behind him and streamed from the hole in his forehead. He stood there dumbly, then dropped to his knees, falling to an awkward rest, back bent over his shoes.
Ced scrambled back, banging into the wall. "How did you know?"
Kansas walked forward and kneeled over the body. "Where to shoot? Typically, the brains are kept in the head."
"That he was threatening to kill you!"
"Was he? My conscience is happy to hear that. Why'd he want me dead?"
"To keep me leashed to his desk." Ced edged closer to the body. "Why..?"
Kansas lolled his head side to side, pressing a small white rod to his neck. A screen on the end of the rod displayed a list of figures. All of them read zero.
"I'm taking over."
"You'll never take over the Dragons. Is this some kind of joke?"
"I'm not taking over the Dragons." She put away the white rod and looked him in the eye. "I'm taking over the Locker."
His brain tripped and fell. "You've been out too long. You've got space madness."
Traitor (Rebel Stars Book 2) Page 14