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To my parents,
two immigrants
who get the job done
CHAPTER ONE
Asteroid belt—undisclosed location
30 minutes after my totally coincidental rescue
The nurse-bot that took my vital signs and continues to monitor me from its charging slot in the corner of this small room doesn’t have very sophisticated sensors. Even if it is watching me, all it’ll see is a guy with his ear up against the air vent on the far wall. My derelict spacecraft was just towed into this strange asteroid station; of course I want to know more about my surroundings. Natural human curiosity, right?
If only my ears were working better right now.
“—waiting (STATIC) SUPPLY DRONES (STATIC) inner planets (STATIC) TIME—”
My left eye’s heads-up display shows me the agency’s best available map of this station, overlaid with a diagram of where my ears are tuned to right now. Using custom software, I’m able to focus in on sound sources at specific distances from my current location based on amplitude, frequency, and some other technical jargon I didn’t really pay attention to while Oliver, my Equipment officer, was explaining it. I know he’s proud of the gadgets he makes, but I don’t need to know how they work; just tell me what buttons to push, man.
I’m hearing a lot of audio interference, and the volume keeps jumping up and down. I move my eyes and my fingertips in specific patterns to adjust my hearing enhancements. My left eye scanners, which can sense throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, aren’t detecting any active jamming or other technological interference. There must be something wrong with my hardware. Unfortunately, I can’t get to the actual implants in my body without nontrivial surgery; the best I can do right now is compensate by washing the input through software signal processing modules.
It’s nobody’s fault. The bionics that enhance my hearing are pretty sensitive, according to Oliver, and the high acceleration I endured while traveling in a military spacecraft out to this mid-belt asteroid must have compressed something important or pushed some component out of alignment, and now I’m not getting a good connection between the audio pickups in my ear canal and the computer core under my collarbone.
“—astronaut (STATIC) clearly isn’t (STATIC) new boot magnets—”
I think I’ve got the volume under control now. And the static seems to be coming in regular waves; maybe I can filter it out. I wiggle my fingertips to try some standard soft-mods.
Hardware repair in the field was one of the problems my nanobots were supposed to address. Last year, Jessica—my Surgical officer—got approval from our government overseers to start experimenting with new software for the microscopic robots in my blood, so they could do more than just maintain a wireless mesh network for all the other tech inside my body. But for whatever reason, the bots either haven’t identified a problem in my ears or haven’t been able to repair it.
And I admit, there is an outside possibility that this issue is related to my earwax, which Jessica claims is medically termed “intermediate” or “unclassifiable.” In genetic terms, that means I have a rich ancestry bringing together multicultural ethnic groups from all over Planet Earth. In practical terms, it means the consistency of my earwax varies quite a bit between “wet” and “dry” and is difficult for the nanobots to deal with algorithmically. But again, that’s nobody’s fault. You can’t blame me for my heritage.
“—murder! Homicide! Robotic manslaughter? What? That’s totally a thing…”
That’s better. I think? I’m confused for a moment because I can definitely understand some words now, but they’re not making any sense.
After another minute or so of eavesdropping, I realize I’m hearing a group of off-duty personnel playing a guessing game. One of the players is really bad at it. It’s amusing, but it’s not what I’m looking for.
Now that I’ve fixed—or at least mitigated—the input problem, it’s time to actually start searching. I probably don’t have much time before a human comes back to this medical bay to check on me.
Voices fade in and out as I modify the target distance. It’s like I imagine tuning in an old frequency-modulated analog radio signal must have been like—or, at least, how it’s depicted in the old entertainment vids I consumed desperately in my childhood. Benefits of being the orphaned child of twentieth-century media scholars who left behind their entire digital library when they died.
“… oh! Yeah! Harder! Don’t stop! YEAH! YEAH!”
I’m momentarily embarrassed, then oddly fascinated, then a little grossed out by the sounds of this erotic interlude. Moving on.
“… catalog those specimens yet?”
Jackpot.
“Doc won’t let us handle them until he’s done with the isolation study,” says a second voice, which sounds much more lethargic than the first.
“And how much longer will that take?” asks the first voice, who I’ve decided to call Grumpy.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” replies Sleepy.
“Shit, man.” I hear clinking noises, like laboratory glassware. “I didn’t volunteer just to sit on this rock with my thumb up my ass.”
“Hey, they’re still paying us, aren’t they?” says Sleepy.
“I can get paid planetside,” says Grumpy. “I came out here to do some actual fucking science.”
I’ve got an approximate distance to the voices, but not a precise location—this software wasn’t designed to trace sounds bouncing through ventilation shafts. I add an overlay to the station map in my eye to show what direction the sounds are coming from.
I do my best not to think about how the agency got this map. The last agent we sent out here, code name WOMBAT, had many of the same scanning implants I do, and was able to transmit a few recorded data bursts. But there’s a big blank space in the bottom half of the asteroid map—the places Wombat wasn’t able to scan before someone here got suspicious and made W disappear. Hopefully into a shielded holding cell and not out into space.
There is an awful lot of shielding in this station. I noticed that as soon as I came aboard and turned on my eye. Even for an off-the-books science facility. What are they hiding? It makes sense to experiment with biotech out here in the asteroid belt, where there’s no risk of spreading contagion—hard vacuum will kill most biological specimens before they can reach another inhabited location—but why would you need to hide the rooms inside the station from each other?
An alert flashes in my eye. I muted the ear I don’t have pressed up against the air vent, but left a separate software process running to monitor its signal input, and the alert is now telling me that it hears footsteps approaching. I push myself away from the wall, sit back on the med bay’s exam table, and reset my ears to normal hearing, bypassing the implants.
The door opens and a new person enters. It’s not the astronaut who pulled me out of my “derelict” spacecraft after picking up my distress signal, or
the technician who met me at the airlock and then brought me to this room—which has a door that locks from the outside, I was interested to discover. Why would you need to lock people inside your medical bay?
“So,” the man says, looking over the computer tablet in his hands, “Mr.—Bafford?”
“Bafford,” I correct, putting the emphasis on the second syllable. If I need to use an alias, I might as well have some fun with it.
“Bafford,” the man repeats. “I’m Dr. Imley—”
“You a medical doctor?” I ask. I hope my fake working-class Belter accent isn’t too broad.
He looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Yes. What other kind of doctor would I be?”
“I dunno, some of the guys I met on the way in were saying there’s scientists here, doing science stuff.”
Imley continues staring at me. “How many ‘guys’ did you talk to, exactly?”
I shrug. “Who’s counting? How many persons you got on this rock, anyway?”
“I was under the impression that you only met one technician on the way here.”
“Well, you know,” I say, waving one hand, “there was the other guy outside.”
The agency couldn’t send me in with the same cover that Wombat used, that of a government inspector who mistakenly landed on the wrong asteroid, so I pretended to be a freelancer whose spacecraft malfunctioned near this rock. Nobody in the belt can legally ignore a distress call, and there was enough waste heat coming off this asteroid for a civilian pilot to plausibly detect. It had taken me nearly half an hour of transmitting, with my main radio dish aimed directly at the station, before they responded.
Imley nods. “I’m just going to give you a quick physical exam, Mr. Bafford. To make sure you didn’t suffer any adverse effects from drifting in space for so long.”
“I feel fine,” I say. “Just glad that you guys had a station so close, you know? Who knows how long I might have been stuck out there otherwise. Which company did you say owned this rock?”
Imley turns his back on me and opens a drawer, rummaging for something. “Do you have any preexisting medical conditions, Mr. Bafford? Any allergies that I should be aware of before I begin treatment?”
“Hey, whoa, whaddya mean treatment? And in fact, my religious beliefs prohibit me from using certain substances—”
He whirls back around, holding something in one hand and moving it toward me. I can’t tell what the thing is. I grab his wrist and push it away, then catch his other arm and twist it down to cause maximum pain.
Imley screeches as I lever myself off the exam table, plant my feet on the ground—this is trickier than it sounds in the low gravity of this asteroid—and pin him against the wall.
Then I get a good look at what he’s holding. It’s a teardrop-shaped ampule, with a flat honeycomb of capillaries on the underside. An injector slug, and I can guess what’s inside: something to put me to sleep.
Not gonna happen, Doc.
“Please, Mr. Bafford,” Imley says, his voice remarkably calm, “you’re suffering from hypoxia. This is a simple reoxygenation infusion—”
“Sorry, Doc,” I say in my normal voice, plucking the slug out of his fingers. “I’m not informed, and I do not consent.”
I press the slug against his neck until it hisses and empties its payload into his arteries. He’s unconscious within a second.
I lower him onto the exam table and try the door handle. Still locked. Dammit. I blink my eye into EM scanning mode and examine the lock. Good news: it looks like it’s purely mechanical, and not wired into any type of alarm system. But I will need a tool to break it.
I press my ear against the door and tune my audio sensors to detect breathing, just in case there’s a guard standing outside. After a few seconds with nothing tripping the sensor thresholds, I turn to face an empty spot in the room and open the pocket.
My code name is KANGAROO. That’s the only name I have within the agency. Not because my face resembles a large marsupial mammal, or because I used to be an Olympic hurdling champion—though I have, oddly enough, used both of those ploys in bars to get through some sticky social situations. Well, I tried, anyway. They are both apparently too ridiculous for anyone to believe.
I’m Kangaroo because I have a universe-sized secret pouch. I call it “the pocket” because I named it when I was ten years old; Science Division calls it a “hyperspace shunt” because they don’t know any better than I do how it works or why I have this ability. They’ve been testing me for more than a decade, and we’re still no closer to any real answers.
All we know is that I can open a portal into this empty, apparently infinite, parallel universe. I can’t go inside, but I can hide just about anything else in there—as long as the item can fit through the circular portal and survive being in deep space for as long as it takes me to travel to wherever the agency wants the item to end up. And when I go into the field on a mission, Oliver packs as many things into the pocket as he thinks I might have an outside chance of needing to use.
Most of the time, it’s a huge waste of time to put all those items into the pocket, one at a time, and then have to take out everything I didn’t use afterward. The largest load-in we’ve ever done took nearly ten hours. And that doesn’t include the prep time for Oliver to pack all the delicate machinery inside therm-packs to keep it from freezing too quickly.
Other times, though, I’m really glad he makes me bring more toys than we actually think I’ll need.
The portal into the pocket appears in front of me: a flat, glowing, white disk suspended in midair, level with my chest. I extend my arm and push my hand, wrist, forearm through the center of the disk. That’s the barrier—a “pressure curtain” made of the same exotic energy that rings the outside of the portal. I can open the pocket without the barrier, but then the air in this room would rush through to the empty universe on the other side. The barrier prevents air from escaping into the pocket but is permeable enough for me to push my arm through it.
I visualized a red teapot when I opened the pocket, which placed the portal at a particular location in the other universe. Picturing reference objects in my mind’s eye is the only reliable way we’ve found of targeting the portal to specific places inside the pocket. And every image needs to be unique, to ensure I don’t accidentally open the pocket to the wrong location.
I can’t see through the barrier, but I can feel when my fingers close around the therm-pack. I grab the insulated bag, pull it back through the portal, and close the pocket. I open the therm-pack and pull out a small but very powerful plasma torch.
It’s a bit more than I need for this particular task—a lockpick gun would be faster and less destructive—but I’m not allowed to have a lockpick gun anymore. I blame Oliver. It’s really his fault for not securing his experimental robots better. And not labeling his storage lockers clearly. But apparently he’s still the “responsible one” and I’m the “loose cannon,” so I don’t get a lockpick gun.
The plasma torch makes short work of the lock. I kick the melted handle away, push open the door, and emerge into a long, narrow corridor. According to Wombat’s scans, this passage meets two different corridors in T-intersections at either end. I do a quick jog from one end to the other to verify. Then I blink my eye into range-finding mode to measure the length of the space.
Finally, I think of a white basketball with red lines and open the pocket again, this time a good three meters away from myself. A tethered line of armed spacemen falls out of the portal and into the hallway in front of me.
The pocket always has to face my body, and once I open it, it’s locked to that position in space relative to me. I can place it off-center from myself, but never more than the radius of the portal itself—we just figured this out in the last year, and it’s saved my bacon more than once since then. Oliver keeps wanting to backsolve the math for how the pocket works, but I don’t really care that much. It’s all instinct for me. I don’t have a dial in my head to set th
e portal size when I open it, or an on-off switch for whether I use the barrier; it’s just a thing I can do—like closing my hand into a fist. I like to focus on results. I couldn’t tell you how all the muscles in my body actually work, but you’re going to feel it when I punch you in the nose.
Another trick I can do is pocket rotation—which Science Division still has on the books as “Project Backdoor,” I suspect mostly to spite me, since I insisted on that name when I was a teenager, not allowed to do fieldwork, and scientists were experimenting on me relentlessly. You take whatever rebellion you can get when you’re fifteen years old and under the thumb of an above-top-secret intelligence agency.
“Backdoor” means I can rotate the portal around an item I previously put inside the pocket—but I can only rotate it exactly 180 degrees. It’s handy for getting things in and out of the pocket quickly: throw it in the “front door,” then rotate the pocket when I open it again, and the same item flies out the “back door.” Conservation of momentum or something like that.
The fourteen spacemen, all wearing armored spacesuits and tied together with a safety tether, land on their feet with remarkable agility. They’ve had a lot more low-gravity and zero-gee movement training than I have, that’s for sure.
My ear buzzes with an incoming radio transmission. The radio implant is separate from the hearing enhancements, so this audio is unaffected by my earlier malfunction. “All clear, Captain?” asks a female voice.
“Affirmative, all clear, Sergeant,” I say.
The spaceman at the front of the line—my agency escort for this mission, Leonard “Lenny” Carrozza—removes his helmet and sniffs the air, flaring his nostrils. “Smells like feet.”
“Nice to see you, too,” I say, then add, “Corporal.”
It’s tough remembering all these ranks, but Lenny and I need to maintain cover in front of the X-4s. The Outer Space Service’s Expeditionary Forces are well known as the toughest bastards in the Solar System, and they probably wouldn’t respect Lenny and me quite as much—or feel compelled to follow our orders—if we didn’t outrank them in the same chain of command.
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