“Vargold,” I said. “I trusted him. Should’ve known better.”
“I expect he’s very skilled at manipulation. It’s not uncommon for high achievers to exhibit psychopathic tendencies.”
“He’s not psychotic. Seen enough nut-jobs in my life to know the difference. He’s got a purpose. I just can’t see what it is.”
“You will.” Her hand reached out to explore my face, lingering where my scars used to be. “It’s what you do.”
Cerberus Station was a cylindrical hab of only three levels, its rotational spin provided by an outer stack of fusion generators. I’d heard of the place, but never visited and found the paint scheme something of a surprise given the habitants were mostly war veterans. “Amazing,” Janet said, peering through the flight deck window with wide-eyed fascination as Lucy guided the Aguila to the docks, treating us to a close-up of Cerberus’ slowly spinning hull. Every inch was covered in graffiti, a multi-coloured patchwork of lettering, caricature and abstract geometry. I could see a vac-suited paint-crew at work on some kind of mural, all guitars and lightning bolts.
“It changes,” Lucy said. “Come back in a coupla’ months and it’ll all be different.”
“Like a snake continually refreshing its skin,” Janet said with a delighted laugh.
“Or a buncha weed-heads with nothing better to do.” Lucy punched in the docking sequence and reclined into the pilot’s chair. “Seriously, Doc. You might want to wear a mask when you get through the airlock. My first visit here I got the raging munchies and I never touch the stuff.”
I ordered Leyla and Timor to stay behind. She wouldn’t be able to walk for days and he looked like he needed a break. Slab-born they might be but they’d never been in a war and sometimes I forgot how young they were. Being on the run with no safety net was a novel experience for them, whilst for me it was simply the resumption of an old habit.
“Lucy’s hooked into the Cerberus public net,” I told them. “Get to work on open sources, nothing that requires a password or any kind of interaction. I want every biographical detail on Othin Vargold from the day he was born to right now.”
“We looking for anything in particular?” Timor asked.
“The classics.” I turned and started along the umbilical to the airlock. “Means, motive and opportunity.”
I realised Lucy hadn’t been exaggerating the moment the airlock cycled open, the sweet, musty haze provoking an immediate cough and moistened eyes. “Jesus,” Mr Mac said, blinking. “Haven’t they ever heard of filters?”
The interior of Cerberus station reminded me a little of the shanty town in the Yang-side extremity, the structures being so lacking in uniformity and plainly fashioned from mismatched materials. They stretched away on either side of us, following the massive curve of the hull. Looking up, I found I could just make out the opposite side of the ring-shaped level through the haze, a vaporous melange of exhaled breath laden with what I took to be several varieties of cannabinoid derivatives.
“Where are your papers!” a strident, Germanic voice demanded and I turned to see a wiry, dreadlocked man approaching Riviera, teeth bared in a broad grin. He wore ancient combat fatigues festooned with inexpertly embroidered patches, the sleeves cut off to reveal knotted and densely tattooed muscle.
“Sergeant Kruger,” Riviera greeted him.
“Herr Oberst.” Kruger came to attention and snapped off the kind of salute that only came from Downside military training.
“Joachim Kruger,” Riviera introduced him, replying with a vague salute of his own. “Formerly of the European Federated Defence Force and later Sergeant Major to the CAOS Commando Brigade.” He waved a prosthetic hand at us. “My… associates need some help, the technical variety. I’ll meet any cost, of course.”
“No one on this hab would take a penny from you, Herr Oberst,” Kruger told him. “You know that, I think.” His gaze snapped to me, eyes narrowing in surprised recognition. “Captain McLeod, is it not? The news feeds said…”
“The news feeds were right,” I told him. “As far as anyone knows.”
Although the bulge of unfiltered fun-sticks in Kruger’s top-pocket told me he was no stranger to what seemed to be the main activity here, his gaze retained a shrewd clarity and he didn’t need any further explanations. “Security?” he asked the colonel with a raised eyebrow.
“Si,” Riviera told him. “But our own people only.”
“I will call the boys and girls. They always enjoy a reunion, and Trudy gets lonely on the farm.”
“You’re a farmer?” I asked, following along with the others as Kruger turned about and began marching towards what looked like an open man-hole.
“Of course, we all are.” He laughed and raised his arms to the haze above. “From where do you imagine all this comes?”
Chapter 15
“Forget it,” Mr Mac told Janet. “I can swing IDs for two only, and no vampires. No offence, Doctor, but your kind simply don’t exist down the well. You wouldn’t last a day before being picked up.”
Janet didn’t really do angry, but today was clearly an exception. “You have no comprehension of my abilities,” she replied, voice soft and face very still. “And I’d thank you not to make assumptions.”
We were in the shed where Kruger kept his non-farming tech, an impressive array of comms gear and weaponry. Whilst no one on this hab went armed - they didn’t even have a police force - the former Sergeant Major felt the need to stockpile various breeds of assault-carbine and combat gear. “It was the Colonel’s suggestion,” he told me with a shrug. “Insurance against an uncertain future. For now, we govern ourselves largely without CAOS interference. It doesn’t mean it will stay that way forever.”
Kruger’s farm was one of several on the hab’s second level, a cluster of buildings rising from the otherwise uninterrupted dark green blanket of hemp. A directional array of UV lights running through the centre of the level provided a twenty-four hour light and darkness cycle. Kruger and Trudy, his wife and fellow veteran who spoke through a voice modulator grafted into her neck, maintained a small army of bots to water the plants and till the soil. Come harvest time their produce would form a full ten percent of the hab’s only source of income.
“Every time some Jed blazes up or chows down on a brownie,” Trudy told me, the Slab-born cadence of her voice jarring a little with the upper-class English accent produced by her modulator, “there’s a one in four chance it comes from Cerberus. Wouldn’t think it looking at the place, but everyone here is rich as shit.”
The Colonel’s ad hoc security team began to arrive shortly after we did, six ex-Commando types, most sporting some long-standing injury or artificial augmentation. Given their attrition rate during the war, I was surprised Kruger could gather so many. They all treated Kruger and Riviera with such automatic, fully ingrained discipline and obedience you’d be forgiven for thinking the war had ended only a day before.
“He’s right,” I told Janet, as gently as I could. “Besides, I need you to research Vargold. Leyla and Timor don’t have your skills.”
She remained completely still, eyes unblinking, though I noticed her claws had begun to extend and her mouth bulge under the pressure of elongating canines. Mr Mac began to edge away, eyes flicking towards Kruger’s armoury. “Relax,” I told him softly. Janet closed her eyes, maintaining her mannequin-like stillness for a full ten seconds before her claws and canines slowly retracted.
“Very well,” she told me, opening her eyes, though the habitual smile had vanished from her lips. “But I reserve the right to undertake independent action, should I judge it necessary.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” I said, turning to Mr Mac. “You have resources to call on down the well, I assume?”
He nodded. “So, you’re really intent on going there?”
“That’s where the leads are. Whatever it is Vargold didn’t want me to find is down there somewhere.”
“The IDs I’ve sourced will
work once we’re on the ground, but I don’t have anything that’ll get us through port security. Your face and mine will be near the top of any Fed Sec recognition database, and I doubt they’ll just wipe our records on the off chance that we’re really dead.”
“That won’t be a problem,” I said, holding up the basic smart he’d asked Kruger to buy from the Cerberus market. “You’re sure this is secure?”
“All comms routed through my own private server. It’s swept for viruses and trojans every thirty micro-seconds. Costs a fortune to maintain, but it doesn’t pay to skimp on security. Just one of the reasons it took you so long to catch me.”
“I didn’t catch you,” I said and nodded at Janet. “She did. Best get some rest, we ship out at 0500.”
“Can you trust him?”
Kruger and Trudy had plenty of room, their farm buildings consisting of re-purposed ships left over from the war, including a troop-shuttle complete with sleeping compartments. Janet and I had taken the officer’s suite, though the bunk couldn’t handle two people so we’d pushed a pair of mattresses together on the floor. She lay next to me, skin free of sweat, unlike mine. Once again, her fangs had made an appearance at the critical moment, but she managed to avoid drawing blood this time.
“Completely,” I told her. “It’s one of the more depressing things about him, the delusion that we’re actually best friends.”
She remained silent for a time and I turned on my side, looking at her profile outlined in the dim blue light seeping through the cabin’s porthole. The longer I looked, the less perfect she seemed, more human. It made me want to go on looking for a long time. “I really don’t like him,” she said, breaking the silence. “He’s… wrong.”
“If you mean crazy, I think I got there already.”
“No, not insane exactly, just badly made. It’s like his internal wiring’s not right. And I’d hazard a guess he’s always been this way. The war didn’t do it to him.”
I put an arm about her shoulders, pulling her close. “Don’t worry about it.”
“We don’t have to do this. You do know that, I assume? There are many places we could go. The Belt, the Outer Stations.”
There was no real conviction in her voice, no actual desire to run away. If anything, I suspected she just felt obligated to point out the alternatives. “Joe,” I said. “Vandeman, Kurota, Rybak, not to mention that SWAT team I sent to their deaths. It all needs a reckoning. Something I realised when I first became a Demon; it’s not about justice, or the law, or controlling society or any of that shit. It’s about balance. Sometimes things get pushed too far, a gang war, a murder, a rape. It’s my job to push it back, fix it. And I think we both know that whatever Vargold’s up to really needs fixing.”
She raised herself up, staring into my eyes and I felt myself get captured. She’d told me her mesmerism tricks didn’t work on me, said I was too strong, but there were times when I wondered if she hadn’t just been massaging my ego. “I’m getting tired of this exciting interlude, Alex,” she told me, breath soft on my lips. “I’d like to be boring again, and I think I’d rather be bored with you than anyone else. So go fix whatever needs fixing, just make sure you come back.”
Chapter 16
Operation Polaris had been partly my idea. We’d come up with it in the final year of the war, an infiltration plan to take the struggle down the well. I fully admit it was something of a desperate measure. Finding a way to transport hostile operatives onto the surface of a planet where every square inch of airspace is covered by a wide variety of military sensors required imaginative thinking and an acceptance of some major risk factors. Our intel people calculated the probability of success at 34 percent. So it came as a relief when Riviera liberated Freak from that experimental hab and we decided on the Langley Raid instead: success rating a whopping 39 percent. But that had been wartime. Now that peace reigned over the skies once more, the risk factors could be adjusted to a lower setting, or at least that’s what I hoped.
“This is fucking crazy,” Lucy told me, reading the mission parameters on her console.
“Basic misdirection, Newtonian physics and a little meteorology,” I said. “It’ll work.”
Riviera had used his influence to procure an aged but serviceable shuttle from the small council of senior veterans that formed the quasi-government for Cerberus. The ship was a small maintenance runabout used by the graffiti crews and its hull was a chaotic echo of Cerberus’ outer skin, all malformed cartoon characters and satanic symbols. The interior was cramped, barely capable of holding a be-suited Mr Mac and myself. Climbing into the escape pods had been an exercise in strained muscles and a reminder that I wasn’t getting any younger. The pods were yet more war surplus, Kruger seemed to have an endless supply of the stuff, and had been installed on an extension to the shuttle’s airlock, giving it the appearance of a wasp carrying a dumb-bell.
“Earth orbit achieved,” Lucy said in my headphones. “Two minutes to curtain up. Just to be clear, you’re absolutely sure you want to do this?”
“Indubitably, my dear,” Mr Mac assured her.
“Wasn’t asking you,” she snapped. “Alex?”
“Compared to Ceres, it’ll be a warm cup of cocoa,” I told her. “Don’t worry.”
“Guess that job with Astravista’s screwed now, huh?”
“I wouldn’t give much for their share price when this is over. Guess you’ll have to find another route to the stars.”
“Yeah, I’ll build my own from spares. Stand-by for eject in sixty seconds.”
There was a pause then a shudder as Lucy detonated the plasma cannister fixed to the upper hull before making a suitably panicked mayday call on the universal emergency channel. “Oh god! This… this is Delta-One-Five in high orbit, polar quadrant three. We have an emergency situation. Repeat emergency!”
A pause before a calmly professional voice came over the comms, male with a South American accent. “Delta-One-Five, this is Emergency Control and Response. State the nature of your distress.”
“Explosion… I mean we have an explosion on board. Something just blew in the crew compartment.”
“Are you injured?”
“Negative. The flight-deck is sealed but I’m reading extensive damage… Shit! Cameras show the compartment is open to vacuum. There’s a gaping hole in the hull. We’re losing atmo.”
“How many crew are on board?”
“Me and two others… I can’t see them on the cams. Oh fuck!”
“Please remain calm, Delta-One-Five. Is your craft responsive to control?”
“Uh, yeah. Trim’s kinda weird, but she’ll shift alright.”
“We have you on scope. You need to kill your primary engines and burn to a stable orbit. Can you do that?”
“Yeah. Burn to stable orbit. Got it.”
“Rescue craft have been scrambled to intercept you. ETA twelve minutes…”
That was our cue. I gripped the pod’s internal hand-holds and braced myself for what came next. A hard jolt and the pod was free of the shuttle, thrusters firing a pre-programmed sequence to angle it for an atmospheric entry.
“No!” Lucy yelled over the comms. “They ejected. Oh shit no!”
“We’re tracking them,” the emergency guy said in a soothing tone. “Rescue crews will be there within an hour of landing…”
“You don’t understand,” she sobbed. “This tub is ancient. Those pods haven’t been serviced in years. They don’t even have suits on. There’s no way…”
The comms crackled and died as the first wave of turbulence hit the pod, indicating I was now skimming the atmosphere. My eyes roamed over the pod interior, searching for any sign of smoke that might indicate a heat shield failure, though at this stage there really wasn’t much I could do about it. After checking them over Kruger had pronounced the pods to be in full working order but Lucy hadn’t been exaggerating their age. The buffeting grew worse by the second, eventually getting so bad that I had to close my eyes a
gainst the jumbled confusion.
It stopped abruptly after a full minute, by which time I’d come close to cracking some teeth as my jaw clamped tight against an involuntary shout. The pod took on only a slight tremble as it fell through the mesosphere and I did some mental arithmetic to try and pinpoint the exact second the carefully placed explosives would blow. I was out by a good five seconds.
A rapid series of concussions and the pod split apart, the constituent parts flying away to leave me tumbling through the stratosphere. We had immersion-simmed the crap out of this scenario and it turned out my muscle memory hadn’t deserted me: arms tight against the body, legs together, head pointed at the surface, maintaining a vertical spin as the smoke cannisters and flares Kruger had welded onto the suit left a dirty stain in the sky. I regulated my breathing to a steady rhythm to slow the flow of judgement impairing adrenaline and did my best not to get distracted by the view…
Blue… It’s all so blue. My only previous trip down the well had been a pretty frenzied affair that hadn’t left much room for sightseeing, what with all the explosions and dismemberment. Now I found myself falling through an infinity of blue, the sky, the ocean far below. For someone raised in enclosed environments it made for an experience that was equal parts exhilarating and alarming. There’s so much sky.
The pods had been launched close to the northern hemisphere at a trajectory that would take us above the Arctic Circle. The scanning stations were less numerous at this latitude and the atmospherics made for lousy maintenance, or at least they had back when I came up with this plan. The further I fell the more of the polar ice-cap I could see creeping over the blue of the ocean. A thin vertical smoke-trail half a mile away told me Mr Mac’s pod had also performed as expected. With any luck the surface monitoring stations would read us as just more debris. Lucy would be burning clear by now, all comms deactivated and giving every appearance of an independent haulage contractor who didn’t want to stick around for the official accident enquiry. Orbital Security might chase after her but I had every confidence in her evasion skills.
Slab City Blues - The Collected Stories: All Five Stories in One Volume Page 31