‘Look, can you honestly say that having her around won’t affect your judgement?’ Pagan finally asked.
‘No. What I’m saying is we’ve coped with it before and it worked. Don’t get me wrong. If I could talk her out of going I would.’
‘I wouldn’t try talking to her at the moment,’ Cat suggested. ‘She’d probably shoot you again. I might give her the gun.’
I glared at Cat. ‘Where the fuck do you get off, being so judgemental.’ Then I turned to Pagan. ‘It’s thanks to your brave new world we’re in this spot.’ It was weak, I knew it was, but I was miserable, pissed off and wanted to lash out.
‘Oh yeah, this is my fault,’ Pagan said sarcastically.
‘No, it’s thanks to you not being able to keep your dick leashed,’ Cat said to me.
‘Fine, whatever. Pagan, can you and Morag work on what we need and then we can leave Morag on board? Even if we have to drug her.’ At this Pagan started to look very uncomfortable. ‘What?!’ I demanded, beginning to lose my patience.
‘It’s just …’ Pagan stammered.
‘She’s more important to the mission than you,’ Cat said bluntly. I stared at her. It took me a while to work through what she’d said.
‘You fucking what?!’ I demanded. ‘Twelve years, twelve fucking years is a fuck of a lot more time in-country than you. You fucked off for your cushy corporate job.’ Then because I wanted to make sure I pissed off everyone I turned on Pagan. ‘And you, you not getting too fucking old for this shit?’
‘Well yes,’ Pagan said, surprising me.
Cat had bristled but remained calm.
‘Don’t you get this? We’re just guns, that’s all. It’s information warfare and all we’re here to do is keep them safe. They’re going to be the ones doing the fighting,’ Cat said.
‘Demiurge will fucking destroy them if they try.’
‘Right, that’s it. Shut up, both of you,’ Pagan snapped. ‘This is my problem. I may be over the fucking hill, but see how far standards are slipping. Like this we’re just going to get ourselves killed.’
‘So you want to leave me and Mudge behind? Fine. Fuck off with your American friends then. What, are you licking up to her to get in her pants?’ I was just being petty but I wasn’t liking this picked-last-for-PT bollocks, even if I really didn’t want to be here in the first place.
‘Figures that’s how you’d think of it,’ Cat said, an edge in her voice. I was going off her rapidly. Not as rapidly as she was going off me though.
‘No, we want you and Mudge to sort your shit out so you’re not a fucking liability,’ Pagan said, remaining calm.
I turned to give him another mouthful but something about his expression stopped me. He looked serious, maybe even formidable, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was pity there too.
‘Why don’t you go and have this conversation with Mudge?’ I muttered, looking away from the pair of them.
‘You know why,’ Pagan answered quietly.
I did. If Mudge was going to listen to anyone, and he probably wasn’t, it’d be me.
‘I’ve a good mind to just turn around when we get to Freetown and head back,’ I told them both.
‘Well let us know if self-pity wins out, won’t you?’ Pagan said, and then he and Cat turned and walked away.
It was a long and miserable journey in a rusting, damp, dripping, metallic piece of shit that seemed to echo every time somebody moved. It was claustrophobic because there were no external views and it smelled due to rudimentary facilities. I’d had worse trips, but everyone being pissed off with everyone else was what truly put the cherry on top. The only time that Morag even met my eyes was to glare at me. I felt like those looks could cause physical pain. With Pagan and Cat it was strained politeness. Mudge was the only cheerful one, but that just got on everyone’s nerves. I didn’t have a chat with him like Cat and Pagan wanted me to, largely because they wanted me to. But I didn’t get fucked up with him either, which was what I felt like doing.
I felt like a Jonah. Like I was screwing everything up. When I told Mudge this he agreed with me.
I was so pissed off with everyone I didn’t care if they didn’t like me learning the trumpet. I played what I thought were suitably mournful blues numbers that echoed through the ship. I thought it was better than listening to a fellow passenger strain on the cludgy. The others thought differently and the captain threatened to space me. By that point I think I’d managed to piss everyone off. I was almost revelling in it. Like Mudge. I wondered how he managed to keep up his cheerful demeanour.
Of course, at the end of every shit journey is a perfectly shit destination. We were going to Freetown Camp 12.
In theory the Belt was open to exploitation by anyone. In practice everybody had to rely on logistics from the extra-planetary Belt Prospect Industrial Corporation. Outside the big Belt cities of Ceres, Vesta and Hygeia, it was the Freetown stations that provided docking facilities and supplies for their own fleet of factory refinery ships. BPIC were pretty much a law unto themselves, and as long as the minerals kept coming nobody on Earth cared. Any smaller corporate attempts to exploit the Belt were charged exorbitant prices for what they needed from the Freetown stations until they went out of business. If they didn’t take the hint then BPIC could more than afford the corporate army and space forces necessary to protect their assets. More underhand activities were handled either by specialists or by contracting out to the inevitable organised crime elements that ran the Freetown vice franchises.
Anything went out on the Belt as long as it did not disturb the flow of ore. Smuggling, gambling, prostitution and drugs were all fine as long as BPIC got its cut. You could kill someone provided you knew the right people and had enough money. There were rumours of gladiatorial snuff games as well.
In short it was like Earth, maybe a bit more honest about things, although unlike Earth the Belt was one place you were guaranteed a job. That was as long as you didn’t mind indentured servitude and a short life expectancy due to cheap suits with shitty radiation protection. See, humans were cheaper to run than machines. They didn’t even need training any more. Cheap skillsofts would do for on-the-job training. Though you had to pay the company back for that and for your ride out to the Belt – and for your ride back in the unlikely event you ever earned enough before dying in an industrial accident or from radiation poisoning.
You also had to pay for the performance-enhancing drugs you needed to keep up with your quotas. What little money you might have left, instead of saving for your future, you were better off spending at the vice franchises, on alcohol, drugs, sense booths and the truly desperate, and if rumour was true, often slaved, hookers.
Any attempts at unionisation or even basic workers’ rights were stamped on hard. Insurrection or revolution was a joke. Who had the energy? Any ship attempting to bring out seditious materials was impounded, its entire crew executed. BPIC had more power than many Earthbound governments, a virtual monopoly and the muscle to back it all up. They ran their own corporate feudal empire. Their employees were known as Belt zombies.
Breaking Merle out would have been a major operation. Instead we were going to negotiate. Or more accurately use Sharcroft’s money for a bribe. It would have to be a large bribe.
What Cat’s brother had done was audacious. Most ore or other bulk cargoes like ice (it was cheaper to import ice from the Belt than from Earth, to turn into water for the various habitats in Earth orbit) were fired by mass driver, either from the stations or the factory ships themselves. The mass drivers propelled them into high Earth orbit, where net tugs caught them and shunted them to the Spokes’ high ports. Precious metals were mined with automated machinery, as it was more precise and trustworthy than Belt zombies. BPIC Armed Response, the corporation’s well-trained and equipped security force/private military, kept the precious metals under guard. These were transferred back to Earth on high-security, high-speed, intra-system clippers.
Merle had
tried to hijack one. On his own. He nearly succeeded. He’d somehow gained access to it via EVA after it had left its security bay at Freetown Camp 12. Got past its electronic security. Taken out its security and crew and then, through a combination of pre-programmed hacks and high-end skillsofts, attempted to divert it. He would have got away with it except that the prearranged security responses he’d bribed a lower-echelon BPIC security employee for were a day out of date. There was a pursuit and a firefight and Merle got caught.
What I couldn’t figure out was why he was still alive. I could understand why they’d want him alive long enough to work out how he’d done what he’d done, but this had happened eight months ago. They would have that information by now. Why go to the expense of locking up someone with his skill set? BPIC didn’t need brigs; they had airlocks to push the troublesome out of. On the other hand, I could make this someone else’s problem and just fuck off back to Earth with Mudge and get drunk and fucked on drugs. I wondered if I had enough money now for my own sense booth. It wouldn’t be difficult to get a ship back home. Hell, the way I was feeling they could just fire me out of one of the mass drivers.
The Belt now had religion. God was with us. Hallelujah. We were keeping comms chatter to a minimum but I opened a link to the ship’s systems so I could watch us land. See what this shit hole looked like. Maybe just to depress myself a little further.
It looked like a scar. The station was in a recessed crater created by strip mining. It looked like an old quarry suspended in the night.
The asteroid itself was a little over twenty kilometres in length. As we sank into the scar and the cameras panned around, I could just about make out some of the other asteroids that formed the Gorgon family. They looked like potato-shaped rocks suspended in the sky, utterly static, though obviously they weren’t. There were vast fields of solar panels tethered high above Gorgon’s surface. They, along with a fusion reactor buried far from the main station and hydrogen cells, provided fuel for the town-sized camp. The floor of the scar was covered in prefab vacuum-proofed buildings, storage tethers and dry docks for the massive factory ships with their insectile legs for gripping and burrowing into asteroids. There was something parasitical about the factory ships. Their enormous industrial mass drivers reminded me of stings. Several of the heavy-duty tethers had ice asteroids attached to them. They would be processed for fuel and much-needed water. The dormitory, commercial, administration and vice areas were recessed deep into the rock. This was largely to help shield from radiation.
Space in the scar was busy with the ponderous movements of incoming and outgoing factory ships, the faster tugs, faster still intra-system clippers, enormous super-carriers and the barely tolerated tramp independents like ours. All of this was being watched over by a BPIC destroyer. I had seen military facilities in the colonies less well armed than this station. Piracy was a big if rarely actualised fear, but I suspect that much of the weaponry was to prevent annexation either by a nation state or more likely by another extra-planetary corp. They had missile, plasma and laser batteries, rapid-firing railguns, mass driver cannons and even one of the huge particle beam cannons.
The landing pads were at the base of the scar against one of the rock walls. On the ship’s external lenses I saw our manoeuvring engines fire as we slowly sank into the crater. We were tracked by weapon systems all the way. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was being swallowed. I barely felt the landing, though I heard metal protest ominously throughout the ship. The cargo airlock concertinaed out to mate with the Loser’s Luck.
We’d already used the ship’s comms to text ahead our request to meet Wilson Trace, the BPIC regional director who ran Freetown Camp 12. We’d been pleased that he’d agreed to a meeting. We were less pleased when we saw his conditions. Before we were allowed anywhere near Mr Trace we had to have security locks put on all integral weapons and an inhibitor jack in one of our plugs to dull enhanced reactions. It went without saying that we had to be unarmed. We didn’t like it, but it was either that or we would have to mount a major operation and make yet another powerful enemy to get Merle out. Besides, it would be nice to not have to resort to violence for once.
The plush office was a marked contrast to what we’d just walked through. There had been no luxurious carpet, no laser-carved basalt desk and very few recessed windows looking out over the tangled industrial mess of Gorgon’s scar. Instead we had seen deep-set eyes lined with scar tissue from botched re-implant jobs on the faces of gaunt, indentured miners who had little care that their stale sweat added to the stench of oil and badly ventilated air. Many of them showed signs of radiation poisoning or seemed to have respiratory problems. They bunked in the streets. The bunks were stacked high, each with its small locker. The miners were charged for them. Fights were commonplace and nobody did anything, though BPIC Armed Response watched on. The guards even had exo-armoured personnel and light mechs in case the miners got out of hand. I couldn’t see that happening – it looked like most of the Belt zombies had given up years ago.
As desperate as the miners looked, they were nowhere near as sad as the wrung-out-looking, presumably once-attractive men and woman who worked the vice franchise. At least they weren’t slaved, I’m not sure I would have coped with that. Gaudy, badly maintained neon signs promised pleasure that the reality of the bars seemed to refute. The Yakuza had won the vice franchise for Freetown 12. The gangsters and the guards were the only people who looked well fed. Many of the Yakuza were stripped to the waist, gangster ink on display, and all of them wore shades. They had watched us pass impassively. The miners and the hookers had looked at us less impassively. I could feel their resentment.
For some reason Pagan had seemed pleased that the Yakuza were running the vice franchise and had split off from the rest of us to speak to them. I hoped he wasn’t going whoring. Mudge had given him a list of exotic pharmaceuticals he wanted picked up. Pagan had seemed less than pleased about this. It would have been better if Mudge had gone with Pagan but Mudge insisted that his people skills would be of use to us with Trace. I had my misgivings.
We’d walked right through the so-called entertainment area of the station. It had been so quiet. People weren’t talking, just drinking or rutting or taking some recreational substance to try and make it all go away for a little while. There were no sense booths. Nobody here could afford them.
As we climbed through the levels towards the corporate offices, the bunks in the alcohol- and blood-muddied dirt of the street became small wage-slave cubicles. The offices got larger and more luxurious the higher we went until we found ourselves in Trace’s.
He kept us waiting so we understood how important he was. When we were finally escorted into his office we found ourselves covered by four guards with M-19 carbines. There was also an automated twin fast-cycling rotary laser system protruding from the wall above and behind Trace’s desk. That was overkill. It was the kind of weapon used for point defence on spacecraft. I guessed this guy was paranoid.
Trace was obviously engaged in a sub-vocal conversation on his internal comms link. He continued with it apparently oblivious to us. It looked social judging from his occasional laughter and easy-going demeanour. Of course this was all for our benefit. He looked like every other suit I’d seen. Indeterminate age, handsome but indeterminate looks bought in a salon somewhere. Neat, tidy. Probably paid over the odds for a suit, the specifications of which would be important to people who knew such things. I was going to forget about this guy as soon as he was out of sight. He was a corporate cliché complete with katana and another shorter sword on a rack behind his desk.
The only thing that did stick out was his eyes. They were obviously expensive designer implants but they weren’t designed to mimic real eyes. Nor were they the non-light reflecting matt of our hardened plastic lenses. His were shiny black mirrors. You saw yourself in his eyes and you looked small. I didn’t think I was going to like this guy. Mudge had also made up his mind.
We were expecte
d to stand. There was some shouting and Mudge almost got shot when he threw himself into a seat. I wished I’d gone with Pagan. Mudge lit up a cigarette.
‘Actually, it’s no smoking in here.’ Trace’s accent was one of those weird non-accents that people who lived in space had. I’d always thought it made them sound desperate to not come from anywhere.
‘I know,’ Mudge said agreeably. I groaned inwardly and Cat glared at him. We were off to a good start. A little bit more sub-vocalisation and Trace finished his call. I inclined my head towards the guards and the lasers.
‘You’re safe. We just came here to talk,’ I told him.
His mouth twitched into a momentary and humourless smile. ‘I’ll keep this brief. Merley Sommerjay is a thief, a bad one, and you have committed terrorist acts against this very corpora—’
‘What terrorist acts?!’ Morag demanded. Trace looked annoyed at being interrupted.
‘The release of the God virus into our systems. The removal of which is an ongoing and mounting cost, not to mention how much setting up dedicated and secure God-free networks has been.’
‘Oh,’ said Morag. I think she’d forgotten.
‘Any conflict between Earth governments and their colonial forces has nothing to do with us as a commercial organisation and we do not wish to take sides.’
‘You worked extensively with the Cabal, didn’t you?’ Mudge asked as he stubbed his cigarette out on the basalt desk. Trace stared at him. He let Mudge see himself small in the reflections of his eyes.
‘We do business with those who can pay,’ he told Mudge.
‘No ethics?’ I asked. I was answered with a sneer. I looked away from Trace to try and calm myself. I was amazed that nobody had ever put the drill arm of a mining mech through his window. Spaced this sweetheart of a man. I watched a long range strike craft sinking into the asteroid’s scar. It was similar to the Spear, the craft we’d taken to the Sirius system, but an older model. I turned back to the conversation.
War in Heaven Page 22