Fire Fight

by Chris Ward

  So tiny. She stared at the computer chip in her hand, no more than an inch across. It allegedly contained plans for a military offensive on Abalon 3, a fire planet in the Trill System. Her customer had tasked her team with the chip’s procurement, which was being transported aboard the Grun Freighter Draft V14. The need for its recovery had come after the unfortunate freighter had found itself hijacked shortly after exiting stasis-ultraspace in the outer regions of the Phevius System, before falling into the sights of Barelaon mercenaries hunting its cargo of ionized gold as it headed on a newly set course toward the inner system’s inhabited planets. In the midst of an offensive had proved the perfect time to sneak aboard the ship and recover the plans.

  After her customer received the chip, Lia would be well paid. And halfway across the Fire Quarter, one army would have an unexpected advantage over another, and thousands of unsuspecting troops would die in an unjust and unfair way.

  Lia shrugged. Not her problem.

  She had her own to worry about.

  ‘You’re losing control,’ Caladan had told her in a rare moment of seriousness between the jibes. ‘We’d have avoided some costly damage to the Matilda if you hadn’t stayed to get drunk. You can do what you like to yourself, but don’t endanger the rest of us.’

  The rest, of course, being a one-armed, disgraced pilot, and a stolen, reprogrammed droid.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she muttered, turning the chip over in her hands. ‘No one does.’

  ‘What don’t I understand?’

  Lia looked up, startled. One hand hovered over her handheld photon blaster. Caladan stood in the doorway, his one arm leaning on the chrome framework. Lia stared at him, wishing she could make him attractive. Even missing an arm, had she found him remotely desirable the long hours of stasis-ultraspace could have been used more productively, but his lopsided nose, overlarge eyes and beard that he refused to shave made it impossible. It didn’t matter that as a Farsi he wasn’t even pure human; his anatomy was close enough, but there existed a simple lack of attraction.

  ‘You’re supposed to be flying the ship.’

  ‘We’re in stasis-ultraspace. The robot can deal with the details. It’s time for me and you to get some sleep. I just came to see if you brought any of that piss with you so that I could put it under lock and key before you drank it all.’

  ‘I tried. I dropped the bottle while we were taking fire from those Barelaon mercs.’

  ‘A shame.’

  ‘It would have helped me sleep.’

  Caladan shook his head. ‘You lie. I can see it in your cheeks. You would have fed its properties into the food dispenser so we both had to live on it. We’d have crashed into the first asteroid we passed.’

  Lia shrugged and looked away. She hated the way Caladan always made her feel like a naughty girl.

  ‘Did you start to count down?’

  Caladan smiled. ‘You had eighty-seven seconds left before I left both you and the robot behind.’

  ‘You’re a bastard.’

  ‘I was being lenient. An Earth-year ago I would have given you sixty, but your standards have slipped. Both the robot and myself have noticed it.’

  Lia shrugged. ‘I guess I couldn’t miss an opportunity.’

  Caladan shook his head. ‘Tell me what happened down there. It’s not like you to screw up so bad. I mean, you redefined the whole meaning of the word, but that was close, even for you.’

  Lia looked at her hands and squeezed her eyes shut, refusing to allow the claws of her memory to take hold.

  ‘Today is June 1st,’ she said. ‘By the old Earth calendar.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Today’s the day I lost everything I ever loved.’

  The stasis-ultraspace sleep lasted only thirty hours. For a galactic hop, the trip was a short one, a blink of an eye compared to some busy routes to systems still surviving on a single wormhole link. Major trading routes could take a week or two of humming in place before the blink of transition moved a ship from one star system to another thousands of light years away, and you were left with a short deep space journey from one end of a system to the other. Lia kept her work around the Estron Quadrant—known among the rogue trader community as the Fire Quarter, due to the large number of fire planets—because in galactic terms most of the systems were relatively close together, meaning they contained multiple wormhole routes, and therefore significantly less congestion.

  She tried to sleep, but the relentless shuddering of stasis-ultraspace travel never made a hangover easy to deal with, and the swirl of her memories was always strong around this time each Earth-year. It didn’t matter that more than a decade had passed; the pain was an open wound that would never heal. There was closure to be had if she could ever catch the bastard responsible, but even that would only be partial. She had seen places and peoples beyond even the realms of imagination, watched monstrous spacecraft battle like jousting butterflies, seen great creatures grown out of smoke, yet nowhere was it possible to restore the dead to life.

  No amount of drink would wash away the self-hatred for her own failing, although Lia intended to keep trying.

  Caladan found her on the bridge, peering out through the wall-to-ceiling screen at the distant dot of Iris, the largest inhabited planet in the Areola System. One hand held her blaster, the other clenched and unclenched around an imaginary bottle that at times was wine, others was beer, and in a best-case scenario, would be whisky right from Earth itself.

  ‘Let me guess, you’re racked with guilt over the fee you’ll be paid for providing information that will lead to countless deaths?’

  Lia looked up and raised an eyebrow. ‘Torn,’ she said.

  ‘Just to clarify, I consider myself absolved of all responsibility, being a lowly salaried worker.’

  Lia scowled. ‘You get a cut. That makes it your problem too.’

  Caladan slumped down in the co-pilot’s chair beside her. ‘So you are feeling guilty?’

  ‘Are you accusing me of having humanity? Or this just a sneaky way of trying to get on my good side? Just to clarify, I will never, ever sleep with you. Even if you grow three more arms, it will never happen. Let’s just be clear on that. I’d rather sleep with the—’

  Caladan lived a hand. ‘There’s a crate of Earth-whisky in Cargo Bay Four. I sneaked off the ship for a few minutes back there, while you and the droid were off sightseeing. Sorry, but did you really expect me to stay at my post the whole time? The emphasis on disgraced pilot is definitely on the disgraced. Anyway, it’s the best I could find. Happy birthday.’

  Lia smiled. ‘Sometimes I think that I’m wrong about you. That there really is a human being subspecies behind that beard.’

  Caladan shook his head. ‘Not enough of one, believe me. Parts of me will never grow back, and I don’t just mean the arm. Seriously now, all we’ve ever done is run black market goods in and out of the Trill System. Now we’re getting involved in a war. The money can’t be that good, Lia. What’s going on?’

  ‘Getting cold feet?’

  ‘I was against it from the start. You know that. Someone hijacked that freighter for a reason, and I’m guessing it wasn’t for a few thousand tons of ionized gold. They were after what’s on that chip too. Perhaps we should stay out of someone else’s war.’

  Lia sighed. ‘It’s too late to start throwing your morals around.’

  ‘This isn’t morals. It’s self-preservation. I’ve come close to dying a few times, and I’m keen not to get too practiced at it. How many bounty hunters will we have trailing us if word gets out we were behind shopping the plans?’

  Lia lifted an eyebrow. ‘It would make life exciting, wouldn’t it?’

  Caladan jerked the stump of his left arm. ‘I didn’t enjoy the last bit of excitement I had,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you can stay on the ship then. We’ll be docking in an hour.’

  On the screen, the distant dot had expanded into a world of greens and blues. Lia pulled up a summary
of the planet on the screen, sighing at the familiarity.

  Iris, the third planet out from the Areola System’s star, was three times the size of Earth but carried a similar atmosphere and gravitational system. For Earth-sensitive beings like Lia, the 1.02 of Earth’s gravity would begin to make the shoulders ache after a couple of weeks. It was as close as most planets got to the far-distant birthplace of humanity and its dozens of subspecies, one of the few planets in the Estron Quadrant where humans could live with little or no buoyancy aid, and only occasional use of a respirator.

  In fact, Iris had only one downside—the weather.

  Three times Earth’s size brought weather systems that could be three times or more as devastating, earthquakes that could rip canyons a hundred metres wide, tsunamis as tall as skyscrapers, and rainfall that could torrent for weeks at a time. As a result, all the colonies on the planet existed within great flexible glass domes. Painted to reflect the sunlight and avoid cooking the residents, from the upper atmosphere they looked like whiteheads poking out of the planet’s surface.

  Three hours later, the Matilda sat on a landing pad protruding from the upper surface of the dome of Louis Town, Iris’s third biggest settlement and seat of the planetary government. Harlan5 stayed on board while Lia and Caladan took the mile-high elevator that dropped them, ears popping with the pressure change, right into the middle of Louis Town’s downtown district.

  ‘I’ll meet you back at the ship,’ Lia said. ‘You have your intercom?’

  ‘Of course.’ Caladan held up a strip of paper with his only hand. ‘And my shopping list.’

  ‘Good. Pay in local currency. No trail.’

  ‘Got it.’

  Lia took a speeder taxi into the city’s heart. Louis Town was typical for domed cities built following the Ninth Expansion, some ten thousand Earth-years ago by planetary time. Its original design, all chrome towers with vertigo-inducing walkways and wide boulevards both at street- and sky-level, had entered into a period of overdevelopment mixed with decay. New buildings, many half-finished, others half-demolished, now encroached on what had once been a splendid example of planning and construction. The whole thing resembled a heap of collapsed scaffolding, with dirt and decay and scurrying rats living in the shadows beneath the girders.

  By now Caladan would be sitting in some dive bar, throwing his money at whatever passed for gambling in Louis Town. He often won big, because card sharks were always too trusting of a one-armed man, but whatever coin he made rarely got back to the ship. Wherever you could find gambling, you could find other kinds of fun.

  Jiro’s was a pole dancing club in the city’s seediest part, built underground not far from the giant glass dome’s edge. Lia descended three levels down a sticky flight of stairs, passing several people in various states of drunkenness, as well as a couple of off-worlders: a grey-skinned, six-armed Karpali, and a towering, spine-backed Rue-Tik-Tan from the Trill System.

  The bar’s innards were as she had come to expect from the kind of places she spent most of her time: gloomy and cramped, stinking of blood and human sweat, the floor littered with broken glass, spores and scales from some of the off-worlders, while at one end, a selection of naked girls—many quite clearly surgically enhanced—plied their trade upon sweat-slicked poles while a group of bored customers looked on. It was the kind of place she remembered from her childhood without any remote fondness, the kind of place her mother had dragged her into in search of her father, who had eventually drunk himself to death in such an establishment.

  Her contact was sitting in a booth along the wall, facing away from the pole dancing at the far end. As she sat down he looked up, his face registering neither surprise nor welcome.

  ‘Drink?’ he asked, waving a seven-fingered hand at the bar. A human waiter with the shaved head and hairless face of a monk or a eunuch sauntered over, an electronic keypad in his hands.

  ‘You got Earth gin?’ Lia asked.

  The waiter shook his head. ‘But a shipment of decent brandy from Centaur 3 came in last night.’

  ‘I’ll have that. Large.’

  ‘How large?’

  ‘As large as you’ve got. In fact, screw it. Bring me a bottle. Two glasses.’

  The waiter nodded and left.

  ‘Your expense account has already closed,’ her contact said, eyebrows coming together to appear like a single long line of hair across his forehead. Otherwise, the heavily muscled Tolgier—a human subspecies that shared many characteristics of its parent species—was totally bald, a rarity among a species known for its excessive body hair. Large grey eyes studied her as though excited by her next move.

  ‘I don’t care. I have money. What I don’t have is a drink.’

  ‘Did you bring the chip?’

  Lia nodded. ‘Of course.’

  ‘I trust the mission was a success.’

  Lia shrugged. ‘No one got killed. None of mine, at any rate.’

  ‘Good. The hijacking of that Grun freighter was a complication my client didn’t foresee. I’m grateful to you for recovering the shipment.’ The Tolgier leaned forward, his attempt at a smile becoming more of a sneer. ‘I apologise that the Barelaons fired on your ship. They find it difficult to be selective when bloodlust gets in their way.’

  Lia stared at him. He wasn’t unattractive if you liked subspecies.

  ‘What’s so important about a little tiny chip that you required a dozen Barelaon mercenary ships to throw themselves on to a big, stinking fire?’

  ‘My client would not approve of me giving up that information to a simple smuggler,’ he said. ‘You have fulfilled your part of the bargain, and on my client’s behalf, I will fulfill mine.’

  ‘It keeps me alive to be curious.’

  ‘But too many questions could get you dead.’

  The waiter arrived and put a quarter-bottle of brandy on the table, setting down two glasses.

  Lia lifted the bottle.

  ‘Drink?’ she said. ‘Just to celebrate the mission’s success?’

  The Tolgier stared at her for a few seconds, then smiled.

  ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ he said.

  The sex wasn’t unpleasant, but it took two bouts before she even got the Tolgier’s name: Leon-Ar, a name she couldn’t be sure was real or not, but at least it gave her a point of reference. His client, however, remained a mystery, even though she did her best to coax the information out of him. The best she could get was that the Tolgier worked for a warlord who resided on one of the moons around Abalon 3, and in the end, she had to settle for a decent, if slightly awkward lay. She had never completely adjusted to sleeping with off-worlders or subspecies. For a start, you had to pick the right ones, or a simple physicality mismatch could leave you maimed or dead. Of those that were compatible, some had benefits, but others were creepy. The Tolgier, for all his enthusiasm, still had too many fingers for her tastes.

  She was drowning her frustration in another basement bar when her intercom buzzed. Harlan5’s call-sign appeared on the tiny screen. Lia lifted it to her ear.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Caladan said he couldn’t get in touch with you on the ground.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There’s some kind of block being placed on devices from outside the system. I can’t figure it out.’

  ‘Then how are you calling me?’

  ‘I’m using the Matilda’s computer to boost the signal. I think you should return to the ship with haste. My programming tells me I should be fearful.’

  ‘What about Caladan?’

  ‘I just spoke to him. He’s heading back to the ship.’

  ‘Harlan, prepare the engines for take-off within thirty minutes. I’m heading—’

  The world exploded. Lia dived for the ground as the air was sucked from her lungs. For an instant everything was a swirling mess of color, then the years of combat training kicked in. Her hand found the respirator on her belt, and a second later it was pressed over her mouth.

  S
he sucked in a long breath. Around her, people were screaming. Above her, ducking and weaving among the towers and walkways, a squadron of Dirt Devils—small, circular land-based fighter craft—had blasted through the great dome and were cutting a path of destruction across the city’s upper tier.

  All around, other people were struggling to find the respirators that most space travelers carried as a necessity. Some locals without were running for oxygen bunkers, while a lucky few whose physiology was unaffected appeared bemused by the sudden chaos.

  Lia tried calling Harlan5, but her intercom signal was dead. She reached for her blaster, just as, high above, two of the Dirt Devils made a sweeping turn and began to descend directly toward her.

  CALADAN

  The drunk didn’t know what he was talking about, at least on the surface. In the gambling circles it was common to hear endless monologues about off-worlders disrupting human trade routes, either by manipulating the markets or by deliberate sabotage, but most of it was the kind of general discrimination that one race always held for another.

  Caladan, as always, had won well enough to enjoy the rest of his shore leave. He had learned the hard way never to return to the same gambling den twice, but even the hardest of card sharks let their guard down a little in the presence of a one-armed man. Despite the savage irony, he liked to refer to it as disarming, although the first time he had used the quip, his own arm had been removed from his body and fed to a warlord’s dog.

  It wasn’t a quip he ever repeated out loud.

  Now, leaning over the bar while contemplating which of the seediest establishments farther up the entertainment strip was most deserving of his company, he listened as the drunk waxed lyrical about growing unrest out in Iris’s darklands.

  ‘They’re cropping up like a goddamn pox,’ the drunk said, spilling his drink but catching the glass just in time to retain some of the luminous blue liquid. ‘All over this system and the next. The government, it talks its talk, you know, but it’s all space, space, space. No one cares what’s going on down here anymore, under the domes. We’re squeezed, I tell you. Tax bills come in, but they ain’t for nothing anyone can ascertain. They’re protection fees, the lot of them. Protection against each other. Miss one and I wouldn’t be drinking here with you tomorrow.’