A Deal with the Devil's Broker

by Steve Ruskin

  Stations like Tiber were rough, unfriendly places, where freighters refueled and swapped cargos, where crews traded gossip, drank, ate, got laid, and moved on. You had to watch your back. No one with any money or common sense stayed on them for long.

  The only ones who stayed were those with a debt to pay: they owed someone credits, couldn’t pay, and their debt—along with the debtor—was sold. It was indentured servitude. Debt was a form of currency throughout the Aquitania System, and the debtors were the collateral.

  With interest rates where they were, being a few thousand in debt could easily balloon into a few years of servitude, especially when one factored in transfer fees, room and board, health care—all of which were by law charged to the account of the debtor. The term ‘cost of living’ took on a far more ominous meaning, and investors and business owners knew that buying someone else’s debt was a great way to buy a few years of cheap labor.

  Noemi gritted her teeth, remembering Jeral’s offer to buy her debt. That would effectively make her his slave. But he was just a lifter, first class. There was no way he could afford her. Although, he had sounded disturbingly sincere.

  She shuddered at the thought.

  Noemi had been raised on Tiber by her aunt, Aylene. She barely remembered her parents. They’d been workers on a trans-system ship and couldn’t afford the cost of room and board for their child, so they left her with Aylene soon after she was born. Aunt Aylene was nice enough—self-centered, kind, pretty. She worked as a janitor. When Noemi came of age—fourteen standard years, by Aquitanian law—Aylene left Tiber for good on the arm of some passing freighter’s captain.

  And just like that, Noemi was on her own. Aylene had only stayed around long enough to take care of her. She had her own life to lead.

  Sure, Aylene had tried to get the captain—Zak Rahy was his name—to take Noemi with them. But the captain couldn’t afford to pay off Noemi’s debt. Her Aunt had tried repeatedly, even passionately, to convince him. A few days before Aylene left Tiber for good, Noemi had returned early to the small apartment they shared to find her aunt naked and bucking on top of the captain, moaning, “Please, please,” over and over. As Noemi rushed back out into the hall, red-faced and embarrassed, she understood what her aunt meant that morning when she had told her, “I’m doing everything I can to convince him. But I can’t promise anything.”

  Captain Rahy wasn’t a bad man. He ran a private freighter called the Avodora Vagabond with a lean crew and even leaner margins, in order to compete with the big corporate fleets. Getting Aylene on board was costly enough. There was no way he could afford to pay off Noemi’s debt, too.

  “You’ll make it to the inner zone someday,” Aylene had said. Noemi remembered the way tears rolled over her aunt’s lips when she kissed her goodbye. “Find me when you do. I’ll keep a public profile up on SysNet. When you reach the inner zone, ping me.”

  After a few months, Noemi stopped hating them—Aylene for leaving her, Rahy for taking Aylene away. In the outer zone it really was everyone for herself. At least Aylene had stayed as long as she did, long enough to give Noemi a fighting chance.

  It was then that Noemi knew that she, and she alone, would have to get herself off of Tiber.

  So she got to work.

  By age fifteen, she had risen to the top of the Tiber Station’s kitchens. By sixteen, she had mastered the basics of the station’s maintenance systems. By eighteen, she was working the cargo bays and freighter docks alongside the more experienced lifters, using an older model cargo mech that had been marked for the scrap heap. She’d learned to repair it with forgotten gyros, servos, and other parts she scavenged from Tiber’s cavernous storage chambers.

  At first, Tiber’s other cargo lifters—those with much more experience than she—thought Noemi was simply cute (if a little precocious), her hard work nothing more than a substitute for boredom. A girl! Driving a cargo mech! But after she began to load cargo faster than any of them, and did so with a piecemeal mech she’d built herself, they stayed out of her way, even resented her.

  She made the rest of them look lazy by comparison.

  But Noemi didn’t care. She eventually gained enough experience—and earned enough credits—to pay off her debt to Tiber and earn the right to apply for off-station freighter work.

  She had just turned twenty years old.

  Then came six months of watching corporate freighters come and go, checking manifests for crew-wanted postings, and flirting awkwardly with quartermasters. She’d had a few interviews, showed how well she could pilot her mech. She even got a begrudging reference from Tiber’s cargo foreman, confirming she was quicker than any other lifter on the station.

  She even kept the front zipper of her jumpsuit down lower than usual, because Aunt Aylene told her that sort of thing could make a difference.

  But the freighters always took someone else. Always men. Claimed they had more experience. Which was often true. Or that they were tougher. Which was definitely not.

  So she kept applying.

  While she waited, continuing to work in cargo, she also worked part time in a station bar to build up a small pile of bonus credits and to eavesdrop on spacer gossip, hoping to get a heads up on any upcoming freighter work.

  Then one day, the Devil’s Broker docked. Not a highly desirable ship, according to the talk in the bar.

  “That’s an ExoRok ship,” one grizzled spacer told her. “Their contracts suck.”

  “Yeah? Why?” she’d asked, wiping the bar’s countertop with a filthy cloth, feigning disinterest, when in fact, she was highly interested.

  “Run their ships lean and mean lately.”

  Another patron looked up from his half-empty glass. “With emphasis on the mean. I hear their profits have been down the past few cycles.”

  She looked around the bar at the human jetsam that had drifted into Tiber Station from around the outer rim, drowning in their drink or getting high on their narcpipes.

  Couldn’t be any worse than this place, she’d reasoned.

  So she’d pressed her thumb on the “crew wanted” screen of the Broker’s manifest, got the interview, and impressed a cargo foreman named Braddock with her speed at stacking cargo palettes. She could hit a sub three-minute time from drop point to stack, nine pallets out of ten.

  Strong numbers.

  Her second-round interview was with a lift team leader named Jeral, who requested they meet in one of Tiber’s bars. That should have been a red flag. But she was too eager to get off the station, and she had never made it past the second round before.

  In hindsight, she regretted lowering her zipper before meeting with Jeral. Lesson learned.

  She got the job. Didn’t flinch at the terms of the contract, in part because she was too naive to know any better. The Devil’s Broker would get her off Tiber, and that was all she ever wanted. The only hard part was leaving behind her makeshift mech—she had grown to love its quirks and oddities.

  The day the Broker uncoupled from Tiber Station was the happiest of her life. She’d thought she’d won the New Carthage lottery.

  Yet now, after just one month, Noemi was about to be dumped back onto another trade station and forced to start all over again.

  Hot tears rolled down her cheeks.

  4

  Cold Comfort

  Noemi turned away when the nurse returned. For a brief second—her tears were obvious—a look of sympathy crossed the woman’s face. Then it was gone as she picked up a tablet computer and held it in one hand.

  “Noemi Ochana, is it?” she said, consulting the tablet. “Does it hurt?”

  Noemi sniffled and tried to pretend her tears were from the pain. “Yeah. A lot.”

  The nurse took her hand again, more gently this time.

  “Well, the synthetic nanoclotters in your forgotten medkit would have helped if applied right away. They’re much cleaner. Human blood clots so unevenly on its own. But what’s done is done.”

  She led N
oemi to the surgery bot, set her down in a chair, and strapped her hand down on a padded cradle below the machine’s gleaming steel arms. They were multi-jointed and tipped with an array of blades, drills, nozzles and lasers.

  “It’ll clean your cuts out first. That’s gonna hurt, even with the analgesic—this one’s an older model surgery bot, not as gentle as some of the newer ones. ExoRok is too cheap to spring for anything fancy. Open wide.”

  She set down her tablet and picked up a small spray bottle, holding it in front of Noemi’s face.

  Noemi opened her mouth then recoiled when the sour mist hit her tongue.

  “Sorry,” the nurse said. “We’re a no-frills operation here. Instead of some fruity additive, you get the raw flavor of this stuff. It’s bitter.”

  Noemi gritted her teeth and swallowed. Bitter? It was like licking her mech—a shot of antifreeze with a battery acid chaser.

  But within seconds, she was tingly and woozy. She’d been given something similar once back in Tiber’s medical bay. In addition to numbing the pain, the analgesic was notorious for lowering a patient’s inhibitions, making them both talkative and giddy. Much like booze. Only less fun going down.

  The surgery bot made a quick scan of her wounds with a flashing, fisheye sensor, then began to pass its various arms over her hand. Tools like nimble fingers whirred up and down, cleaning her sliced skin, then poking and prodding and swabbing in a rapid and intricate choreography.

  “Ow!”

  It stung, but not too badly. Soon enough, her cuts were clean and dry—the blood at her wound site had been temporarily jelled with some salve so it wouldn’t flow while the machine operated.

  The effects of the analgesic allowed her to watch the process with a detached fascination. She looked at the exposed bone and the pink muscle of her splayed-open fingertip and thumb.

  “Whoa! That’s neat,” she giggled.

  But after a moment, the reality of what she was seeing worked its way through her sluggish mind. She became queasy and looked away, breathing deeply to settle her stomach.

  The bot hummed and whirred. After a time, the nurse said, “Wanna tell me what happened?”

  No, Noemi’s mind warned. Don’t! But the spray had untethered her mouth from her brain.

  “My team lead got drunk at a party. He tried to kiss me so I left, went wandering around the hallways outside Habitat. Don’t wanna get involved with that guy. He’s my boss, and a jerk, too. But then later, I saw him throwing up in a trash chute …”

  The story spilled out. All of it.

  No, no, no! her mind screamed. What the hell are you doing? But the warning was too distant, her brain too muddled by the effects if the drug. Her mouth kept right on going.

  “… and if I don’t get a new coat, I can’t work. And if I can’t work …”

  “Yes, I know,” said the nurse. “You’ll be dumped at the next station. Someone’ll buy your debt and you’ll be indentured again.”

  The nurse looked thoughtful for a second. “Not a lot of women on Cassius, I understand.” Then she raised an eyebrow.

  Despite being drugged up, Noemi was shocked. “No way!”

  “Hey, don’t get defensive. A lot of girls do it. Some men, too. You’re attractive, in good shape …” Her tone was matter of fact. “It pays off debt pretty quickly, I hear. You gotta do what you gotta do, right?”

  Noemi stared at her, horrified. “I will not become a whore! And I’m not leaving this ship without a fight.”

  “Well, your coat’s shredded, and if you can’t work, I don’t see how you can stay. SCO dar Bueil can sell your debt package. It’s in our contracts. Trust me, I’ve had to out-process a lot of injured spacers here in Medical who can’t work anymore. I’ve seen it happen.”

  “But I can work! I just need a new coat.”

  “No you can’t. Your equipment is your livelihood. You destroy your coat, you can’t work. And then your debt gets sold, and you with it.”

  The whirling arms of the surgery bot were slowing down, the repairs to her fingers nearly done.

  “God,” Noemi sighed. “I can’t catch a break out here. They win either way—you go into debt just for the chance to work for them, and then if you suddenly can’t work, they get to sell you and your debt, recouping their loss and putting you into even more debt. What kind of deal is that?”

  The nurse shook her head. “Think about the name of the ship you’re on. You didn’t make a deal with the devil, but you did make one with the next worst thing.” She laughed at her clever pun. “Look, the Broker sucks, I know. Especially since SCO dar Bueil came aboard. But in the long run, maybe you’ll be better off off of it.”

  Tears formed in Noemi’s eyes again. “But I worked so damn hard just to get on the Broker! And now I’ll have to start over.”

  “As a rookie, your techsuit is more than just gear,” the nurse said, tapping a few buttons on a touchpad and watching a readout on one of the bot’s monitors. “It’s like a test. Keeping it in good working order until you pay it off proves that you’re someone who follows protocol. Worthy of promotion. If you can’t survive the first test, well—it’s kind of how they weed you out.”

  “How do you know all about this? You’re a nurse, not a worker.”

  The brunette paused, pursing her lips. “I’ve been on the Broker a while now. Seen enough rookies like you pass through. You pick these things up.”

  “Great. So I’ve failed already.”

  The surgery bot was now stitching Noemi’s skin together millimeter by millimeter, spraying a topical bandage on top to seal it. It was a clear adhesive, a narrow strip only slightly shinier than the sheen of her own skin.

  Then it was finished. The metal arms pulled back, folded, and the bot whirred to rest.

  Noemi’s head still buzzed from the analgesic, and she realized she was staring like a drunk, mesmerized by her repaired fingertips. Even her fingernails were whole again.

  The nurse held up another bottle, similar to the first. “This is a neutralizer. It’ll bring you back down.”

  “Not sure I want to come back down,” Noemi muttered. But she opened her mouth anyway, took the spray—which tasted worse than the first, if that were even possible—and a few seconds later, her head started to clear. Sensation slowly returned to the surface of her skin. Her repaired thumb and forefinger throbbed with a dull ache.

  The nurse helped her to her feet. “I hope you can figure out a way to stay aboard, Miss Ochana.”

  “I just gotta convince Mayve to give me a new coat …” Noemi trailed off. Then, without thinking, perhaps still under the effects of the analgesic, she put her hands up to her face and wept, cursing at the same time. “Hell and starlight! Jeral is such an asshole.”

  “Jeral?”

  Noemi detected a tone in the nurse’s voice.

  “My team lead. The one I saved from being space trash.”

  “Yeah, I know him. He’s a …” She chose her words carefully. “He’s not someone I would chose to befriend, let’s put it that way.”

  Noemi snorted. “I bet he thinks I’m showing him up because I’m a better lifter than he is. But I’m just trying to do a good job.” She picked up her coat and looked at a clock on the wall.

  “Damn. I’d better go. I’m already late for my shift. If I can convince Mayve to give me a new coat, maybe I can still work. Thank for fixing me up.”

  The nurse didn’t respond. She just stood there, staring.

  Noemi cleared her throat. “Uh, thanks.”

  “Sorry.” The nurse shook her head. “Just thinking about what they say: ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’”

  Noemi smiled. “It certainly applies here on the Devil’s Broker. It’s cold comfort, I guess.”

  The nurse smiled back. “Now, that would be an only slightly better name for this ship. The Cold Comfort.”

  Noemi laughed. It felt good. She hadn’t done that in ages. “Well, the cold part is right, anyway. I’m really sorry I held you
up. I know you were shutting down.”

  Noemi put on her coat and left, enjoying the last moments of warmth in the airlock before heading back out into the ship’s freezing corridors.

  5

  Window

  Noemi had been given a brief tour of the Devil’s Broker on her second day aboard. Like most mining freighters in the Aquitania System, the ship was divided into four main sections: Helm, Cargo, Habitat, and Engineering.

  At the front of the ship was the bulbous Helm, with the bridge at the top, and the officers’ quarters and private mess below. Helm also contained ExoRok’s corporate office. Mayve’s office.

  Behind Helm section was Cargo, which included the processing facilities. Ore was processed in large mills and leeching tanks in one area, then refined in furnaces and cooled in another. Elevators delivered the finished products to the cargo bay where the lifters stacked them with their mechs. The stacks were organized by customer. Most of the metals were already pre-purchased and would be offloaded at the different stations the Broker visited.

  Habitat was near the back of the ship, clustered around the small reactor chamber that powered the ship’s engines. There, shielded from the reactor’s radiation but taking advantage of what ambient heat wasn’t dissipated out into space by the external fins, the crew ate, slept, and enjoyed what meager recreation the Broker provided: an endless library of vids, a grungy gym, and a lounge for reading and playing 3D immersion games.

  Medical was between Habitat and Cargo at the bulkhead, to handle emergencies coming in from either section.

  Engineering brought up the rear of the Broker. It contained the ship’s giant magnetoplasmadynamic thruster housing, where the Broker’s four engines used the reactor’s magnetic and electrical fields to push ionized particles backward, which in turn, shoved the freighter forward through space. The engines also powered the ship’s artificial gravity panels and inertia negation systems.

  A wide corridor ran like a spine through the middle of the ship, providing access along its entire length, from Helm to Engineering. And underneath it all was Maintenance Deck: a claustrophobia-inducing warren of vents, conduits, and access corridors.