Stars & Empire 2: 10 More Galactic Tales (Stars & Empire Box Set Collection)

by Jay Allan

  A narrowed my eyes at the corner of the room. “You, Fay, are as cunning as Odysseus.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  I sighed. “I can’t do my job when we’re all pissed off at each other. Tell Shelby we need to talk.”

  Fay sounded like it was stifling a laugh. “Will do.”

  It always feels like a waste apologizing to someone who’s going to be dead in a couple decades anyway. Let them hang on to their hurt. Usually they do interesting things with it.

  I padded down Fay’s black halls to the black room Shelby had taken as her office. She sat behind a desk that looked suspiciously like a bed sans mattress. Its surface was covered with zero-G-friendly sealable baskets and with reams of self-printing paper.

  “I hear you wanted to apologize,” I said.

  Shelby eyed me. “Fay told me you wanted to talk Titan.”

  “I do. But it’s much easier to get people to agree to unreasonable demands if you immediately shove them off-balance.”

  “You think you’re very clever, don’t you, Rob?”

  I dropped into the chair that faced her desk. “Fay wants me to help you help the colonists.”

  “For reasons that are entirely clear to my human brain.”

  “I think you’re uncomfortable with me because of what you let me see on Mars. But if I’m going to be any use on Titan, I need to know the ins and outs of your proposals. Otherwise, we could wind up working at cross purposes and I wouldn’t have a clue.”

  She snorted. “I thought that was your preferred modus operandi.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Shelby, they got you because you’re the best. One in a generation. Why do you think they picked me?”

  “Because Fay thinks I work best when I’m angry?” Shelby tipped her head to the side. “That’s it, isn’t it? You upset things. When OA’s legal team is busy spinning plates, you’ll be there to poke them in the ribs.”

  I held out my hand. “Bring me up to speed. I’ll start looking for openings to give them a jab.”

  We shook. I left on the rush of two new strategies: to hone myself into an instrument of surgically precise chaos, ready to deploy whenever the legal team got backed into a corner, and to jettison all further interest in Shelby Mayes.

  The drafts of the peace agreements, when Shelby’s skinny and clean-cut partner Vance delivered them in both repaper and omni formats, were simple enough. She proposed the rebels would offer an apology to Olympian Atomics and the OA-owned press in exchange for OA’s promise to stop hosing them down with rubber bullets and locking them inside their domes. The rebels would surrender their makeshift arms if OA released the citizens’ leaders (though those responsible for the executives’ deaths would remain in custody). From there, they could come back to the table and talk about the colony’s future.

  This sounded perfectly agreeable to both sides, and if later the constitutional negotiations broke down, the disarmed colonists would still have Fay’s giant space laser to keep them safe.

  It was the provisions of the sample constitutions that got my blood hot.

  “Hey!” I snapped my knuckles into Baxter’s closed door. “You seen these so-called constitutions?”

  No response. I chain-punched the door, smacking my fists against it six times in a second.

  “Stop vandalizing me,” Fay said from a ceiling speaker.

  “Can he hear me?”

  “He might have turned his ears off.”

  “Squonk!” I shouted at his door. “Squonk!”

  It retracted open a second later. Baxter regarded me from the doorway, lips tightened with disappointment.

  “Oh,” he said. “I thought your remorse had finally driven you mad.”

  “Have you seen these constitutions? They’re a totally screw-job.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know, civil rights?”

  “We’re operating from a low-leverage situation. OA owns the colony ship. They pay for the food, the fuel, the colonists. I wouldn’t be surprised if their lawyers forward the argument that, considering the colonists have been consuming company foods, any parts of them now composed of those foods are by extension OA’s property.” He shoved my arm off the doorframe. “Now get the hell out of my room.”

  “Would you drop the anger already? You did the exact same thing to me. Except in this case, you wanted to go.”

  He gestured to the door. “I did not want to be abducted.”

  “I’ll hang myself later.” I smacked him in the chest with a tight roll of paper. “The most liberal of these might pass muster on Earth. The rest look like something Franco drafted after learning his wife had been blowing Hermann Goering. You can be searched and detained any time you’re suspected of any damage to corporate property—how’s that going to work when they own the world? Will you get arrested for sitting down too hard?”

  “Some of you are fat enough to make that a reasonable precaution.”

  “The most liberal of these would have been booed out of the Athenian Assembly.”

  “It’s the best Shelby believes we can do,” Baxter said. “We believe in her.”

  “I know a company line when I hear one. What do you think?”

  “That it’s better than nothing.” He regarded me with a new spark in his eyes. “Since when were you such a believer in the glorious cause?”

  “Since Hidey-Hole reminded me what freedom looks like.” I rapped the doorframe. “We’ll never make it if we don’t work together.”

  “So it would seem,” he nodded. “Now get the hell out of my room.”

  As the days ticked on, I had plenty of time to doubt my approach. I forgot, sometimes, that however much Baxter appeared to identify as a male, he wasn’t, and that the three time-honored models of addressing male-to-male wrongdoing—1) implicitly agree to ignore it and move on; 2) make fun of the aggrieved party until he gets over it; or 3) apply alcohol until you’re able to admit you’re a sonofabitch and you love him—might be useless with a man-shaped robot. I hunted up Pete and asked if he wanted to put in some dojo time. He agreed, then mopped the floor with me so hard I forgot to ask his advice.

  Fay invited us to the screen room a few hours before arrival on Titan. Saturn dominated the view, a squashed ball of tan bands roiling against each other in apparent slow motion. In reality, its stripes screamed across its surface faster than any hurricane. How did Olympian Atomics manage to insert their gas-collection vehicles into that maelstrom? The planet’s pastel brown rings were as thin as a sheet of paper.

  The image squeezed to the left side of the screen. On the right, a big fuzzy tennis ball took its place. Orange-yellow and seamless, Titan looked smudged and soft at the edges, blurred by its soupy atmosphere.

  “I thought you’d like a look at the big picture,” Fay said. “It’s pretty, isn’t it?”

  Up in space, it certainly was. Down on the ground, it was about to get as ugly as a spear wound.

  “The average processing time on a passport is three to six weeks,” Baxter explained to his new drinking buddy—and to their eavesdropper. “To get to Earth in time for the hearing, I have to leave by this Monday.”

  “Oh, you’re brilliant,” Arthur said into his ear. “Where did you learn that?”

  The man nodded. “That’s a shame.”

  “Truly,” Baxter said. Their gazes locked for a moment, the AI and the middle-aged man. The man had heavy-lidded brown eyes and Baxter wouldn’t have been able to see much in them even if he hadn’t been atrocious at reading the minutiae of human expressions. “So. Drinks are on me until I can think of a faster way to spend her money or get back to Earth one last time.”

  They toasted, talked; the man’s name was Rip. After twenty aimless minutes Arthur urged Baxter to wrap it up, try somewhere else. Baxter cleared his throat and subvocalized the notion Arthur should go mount a wall socket.

  Rip lit another cigarette and squinted at him through the smoke. “So what would you do i
f you could get another passport?”

  14

  From above, the city of Shangri-la, dead center in the dried yellow seabed of the same name, resembled a version of New Houston that had been shrunk down and stretched out like a drawing on a plastic bag. Instead of New Houston’s three hundred-odd bubbles, Shangri-la had about thirty. Rather than sharing edges, they stood a short distance from each other, presumably connected by underground tunnels. Yellowish methane rained down the dome crowns. A landing port sat at the city’s edge, hosting a small collection of winged vessels.

  Inside, the city couldn’t have been more different from Mars.

  Four armed guards in white-trimmed green uniforms waited for us at the gate. Otherwise, it was barren; Shangri-la was privately owned, port included, and its owners rarely allowed visitors besides workers and their relatives. A grinning flagpole of a man towered over the guards, brushing drapes of hair from his eyes. He strode toward us, hand extended like a battering ram.

  “Hey guys, I’ll be your Olympian Atomics liaison on Titan. My name’s Chicago Hayes-Winston y Corrales.” He grinned at us, jaws parted, doglike. “In the interests of ever finishing a conversation with me, you can call me Go.” He wagged his head, pumping our hands. When he got to Baxter, his brows crept up his forehead, mouth puckering to a small O. “You’re Baxter. That’s great you’d come out here. You don’t have anything to worry about on Titan. We’re only interested in two things: keeping Earth humming with juice, and getting out of the System and seeing what there is to see.” He winked at Baxter. His friendly dog’s grin stole across his mouth. “We’re hoping to run into things a hell of a lot stranger than you.”

  Baxter accepted his extended hand. “Now please show me your other hand so I can be sure it’s not holding a pistol.”

  Go laughed, a stuttering, barking wheeze that reminded me of long-term pot smokers. “Fair enough. But when the job’s done, you’ll see I was on the level.”

  I frowned. On the shuttle ride from Fay to the surface, I’d discovered Titan’s hazy atmosphere was thicker than some cheesecakes. I doubted Fay’s laser battery could penetrate this pea soup—this nitrogen bisque—like it had through the thin skies of Mars.

  In other words, we were on our own.

  “Pete Gutierrez.” Go whistled. “I used to watch all your fights. What happened?”

  Pete shrugged. “Someone important to me thought fighting for a living was a dangerous way to earn dollars.”

  “Bummer. So hey, yes.” Go clapped his hands. “Let’s hit the road.”

  We followed him through the short, empty terminal. Two guards halted at the broad airlockable doors while the other two unslung their rifles, jogged outside, and secured the sidewalk.

  Go scratched the stubble around his adam’s apple. “This probably looks all kinds of paranoid, but it was pretty nasty out there for a while. We’ve since got things in hand—as far as you can have an armed revolt in hand—but we’re really into security right now.”

  “How bad was it?” Shelby said.

  “Yeah, pretty bad.”

  “How many casualties?”

  Go scratched his throat, wincing around his eyes. “Well, we only lost two. Executives, that is. Couple troopers and five civilians clowned it in the same attack. Something like thirty other injuries total.”

  “That’s hardly anything,” I said, drawing some looks. Well, they should have seen Artemisium.

  A black-tinted electric bus squeaked to a stop at the curb. With Go, the four guards, Shelby and her three lawyers, Pete, Baxter, and me, along with our luggage and the security guards’ rifles and bulky armor, we took up every cubic inch the bus had to spare.

  The road descended into a light-lined tunnel. A few seconds later, we rose into the yellowish light of the next dome. Right next to the spaceport, it was, theoretically speaking, a high-traffic dome. Dozens of plastic vendor stalls lined the orange-yellow buildings, but not one in three was manned. Pedestrian traffic was equally sparse, mixed up with electric bikes and the odd open-topped cart. Soldiers in green uniforms browsed from stall to stall, as if they were out shopping for new fatigues. Men and women alike wore earth-tone polos with stripes of varying thickness, a riff on the ringed giant hanging somewhere above the soupy skies. After a few blocks of watching different people wearing identical clothes, I had the uneasy feeling we were going in circles.

  “Are they required to wear uniforms off the job, too?” Baxter said, cluing into the same sight. “Or is it corporate policy that no one is ever off the clock?”

  “What?” Go followed our stares. “I mean, you can’t exactly walk over to Macy’s from here, right? Unless you’ve got a ten thousand-year weekend? One of the dingers about operating this far out is we don’t have a lot of choices.” He giggled, nudging the female soldier with his elbow. “Hope you’re not allergic to algae.”

  “It always gets stuck between my teeth,” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” he told us. “We got some real food for you at the hotel. It’s all part of our plan to fatten you up before we eat you for lunch at the business table.”

  He said this with a grinning spaciness that made it impossible to gauge what percentage was joke and what was the sort of casual threat people start making after they’ve had serious money at their disposal for a long time. We dipped into another tunnel, leaving the orange-yellow-brown uniformity of the last bubble behind and surfacing onto a broad avenue amid staggered towers that, aside from the faint yellow hue to their stone, would have been at home in any of New York’s older but distinguished neighborhoods. Armed guards stood still as rifle-toting statues. The bus pulled up under the awning of the Hotel Cronus, an elegant structure with the stylized lightning-bolt-striking-a-mountaintop logo of Olympian Atomics on the stonework above the door.

  “This is us.” Go hopped down the bus’ stairs. “I mean, you. Meeting’s at 8 AM, so you’d better get to sleep, right?”

  Though we stood in full light, my omni said 10:32 PM. I murmured up to Fay, who told me Titanian day cycles were sixteen Earth-days long—in other words, one full “day” was nearly four hundred hours long—and that I really should put more effort into knowing these things.

  Go shuffled in place. “If you’re feeling rushed, just say the word, but everyone here would really like a formal peace agreement ASAP. A lot of people are still pretty mad and these domes are kind of like a pressure cooker, you know? Sometimes I’m lying in bed and it’s like I can feel the anger radiating through the window. Had to drape a sheet over it.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Shelby said. A bellhop emerged to pile up our meager luggage.

  “Well, great. Oh, yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and drop Tin and Jia off with you.” He clapped two of the security guards on the shoulder.

  Baxter nodded at Pete. “Sir, you’ve just grievously insulted our personal security force.”

  “I’m not aggrieved,” Pete frowned.

  Go held up his hands. “Do we really think anything’s going to happen to you? Like dissidents in black pajamas are going to creep under your door and slit your throats in your sleep? Ridiculous, right? Our workers may have brought you onboard, but while you’re here, we feel liable for you.” He slapped the male guard on the shoulder again. “You’ll be like a shadow’s shadow, right? They’ll never know you’re there.”

  “Not if I’m doing my job right,” Tin said.

  Shelby shook her head once, blond ponytail swinging. “Really, Go, I understand your position, but this won’t be necessary.”

  “I hope not. But that’s how it is.”

  I zoned out the rest of the argument. Eventually, Tin and Jia accompanied us up the elevator to our rooms, posting up in the hallway while we gathered in Shelby’s suite for a quick briefing on tomorrow’s peace talks. She stayed vague as Pete swept the room for bugs and turned up nothing, which just meant there was nothing monitoring us we were capable of finding.

  “Am I the only one who noticed Go was higher than a fri
ghtened rocket?” I said.

  “Was he?” Baxter said. “So few of you make sense that I can’t tell the difference.”

  Shelby shrugged her slim shoulders. “He’s just our liaison. This won’t affect the negotiations.”

  “It feels like I’ve wandered into a deleted scene from Apocalypse Now.” I rolled my eyes at the utter lack of familiarity showing on their faces. “Nothing goes particularly well for anyone in that movie.”

  “Is that the one with the tiger?” Vance asked.

  Shelby clasped her hands in front of her chest. “We can worry about what we’re doing here, or we can do what we came to do. You on board?”

  I showed my palms. “Of course.”

  She brushed her hair from her temple. “And right now, I came here to sleep. If you don’t mind.”

  We filed into the hall. Jia, rifle slung over her shoulders, made no effort to hide her sleepy brown eyes following me.

  “What’s up,” I said.

  “Good night, Mr. Dunbar.”

  I fiddled with my maglock, feeling increasingly stupid as I failed to get into my room. When I finally got it open, I stuck my head back out into the hall. Jia nodded at me. I was too troubled to nod back.

  * * *

  “If you’re at all serious about the future of the people who are putting their safety in your hands,” Shelby said, matching eyes with the executives across the long oval table, “we need key people released from custody.” She slid a sheet of paper across the table. “We’re aware they may have been involved in a riot which led to eight deaths. We’re not asking for total absolution. We do need them available to participate in the negotiations.”

  “Okay.” Linigan reached for it with a scab-knuckled hand. His longish brown hair was puffy along its part, as if this were the first time he’d combed it in weeks. A ropy man with a slight paunch, he looked less like an Olympian Atomics co-president and more like he’d just been released from prison himself and inserted directly into a wildly expensive suit. “I get where you’re coming from.”