by Steve Ruskin
And that was where she expected all the other lifters and the processors to be now, during this crisis—crowded around Braddock, monitoring the damage to the Broker and developing a plan for repairs.
Instead, she saw lifeless bodies strewn around the floor, techsuits pulsing with the steady purple glow that indicated the interior sensors no longer detected vital signs from their wearers.
Dead. All of them.
Inside the warm hood of her own techsuit, Noemi gaped in shock.
She walked slowly around the room. Most of the bodies still had their hoods over their faces. But two did not.
Euclez and Russy. Even if she hadn’t seen their faces, the name patches on their suits confirmed it. Both were lifters on the Beta Team. Their cold, blue faces were masks of shock, and their chests were riddled with bloody holes.
Noemi looked in horror at the bodies lying around the floor. Every single one had been shot—most of them multiple times—by something powerful enough to pierce the Kevlar-carbon fiber weave of their techsuits.
“Hell and starlight!”
She stepped through the carnage, her mind reeling. Beneath one of the larger, purple-colored techsuits, she detected an urgent pulse of orange light. Orange—the color a techsuit flashed when its wearer was injured and incapacitated. By the frequency of its pulses, Noemi knew the injuries were serious.
She tugged at the glowing purple body that lay over the orange one. By its posture, she realized it had thrown itself over the other body protectively, and by its weight and girth, she knew it could only be Phonio, one of the ore processors. He ran the smelting furnaces. No one on the ship was as big as he was, and moving him took all her strength.
The man beneath him was still alive, but barely. This one had been shot, too, but only once, in the shoulder—where the name patch had been. It was a big hole, and had bled profusely. She bent down and unzipped the orange hood.
It was Braddock. The sudden cold on his face startled him. His eyes fluttered, trying to focus, while blood gurgled from his lips. He saw her.
“Rookie …”
“Braddock!” she knelt and cradled his head in her hands. “What happened?”
He swooned, his eyes closing. She shook him gently.
“Braddock! Stay with me. What happened?”
His eyes opened, weary slits. “Attack …” he muttered. “Phonio tried to protect me …”
“Who attacked you?” She was looking around for a comm station, thinking she could call Lilia in Medical and have her send a transport bot to collect Braddock. “Hang on. I’m going to get you some help.”
“Private …”
“What’s private?” She was only half listening. She put her arms under his shoulders and began to drag him across the floor.
He groaned.
“Hang on, Braddock—”
She dragged him over to the comm station and swore under her breath when she saw that it, too, had been shot up, monitors shattered and input panels riddled with holes. Sparks danced across the console where power cables had been severed. No chance of contacting Lilia in Medical now. In frustration, she slapped the wide, red Medical Emergency button anyway. It was big, large enough to be manipulated by thick gloves or a mech’s claws. It went up and down—click click, click click—but remained unlit.
No power.
Shit.
Braddock moaned. Fresh blood spread down the front of his techsuit. She saw that he had been shot clean through the shoulder. Not fatal—at least not initially. It missed the heart, but may have hit an artery.
Moving him had been a mistake.
“Rookie … private …”
“I’m here, sir. Tell me, what’s private?”
“Noemi …” Braddock reached up a shaky hand and grabbed her wrist. She bent down.
He swallowed. “Private … privateers …”
Then Noemi understood. They were under attack from privateers—corporate mercenaries. It was always a risk to stop in space, but she assumed an asteroid field was a good place to hide from pirates, or another company’s privateers.
Yet someone had found them, attacked and disabled the Broker. That would explain the sound of the docking clamp she’d heard.
“Be right back.” She ran over to the cargo bay doors and looked through their narrow windows. She saw three mechs inside, staggering and lurching as they shunted cargo. Their drivers wore vacuum-rated, zero-atmo suits, helmets covering their heads. They were moving crates to the bay’s exterior doors … where, instead of open space, she saw the inside of another ship’s cargo hold and the short docking tube that now connected it to the Broker.
Privateers, stealing their cargo.
With those zero-atmo suits on, it was impossible to tell who was driving the three mechs. But whoever they were, they had injured Braddock and killed the rest. Seven other lifters besides herself, and all ten of the processors from the refinery on the level above.
Seventeen dead. Her Alpha lift teammates—Jeral, Mackie and Kett—were somewhere among them. Sure, she disliked them, but no one deserved to die like that.
Noemi looked back at the purple-hued corpses lying behind her.
Then a thought crossed her mind. A dark, impossible thought.
No …
She counted quickly, ticking them off mentally as she walked around the scattered bodies.
Twelve … thirteen … fourteen.
She counted again. Only fourteen bodies, not seventeen. She ran over and checked their patches, reading off the names. All ten processors were there, but only four other lifters. The entire Beta team. No bodies from Alpha.
No, Jeral … you wouldn’t.
But she knew without a doubt that he had.
Those weren’t another company’s mercenaries stealing the Broker’s cargo. Those were her teammates.
Former teammates. Now she saw them for what they were: murdering thieves from another company, killing other hard-working spacers just because they happened to be employed on a different company’s freighter. And for what? A load of space rock?
Suddenly, the various bits and pieces of what she’d heard about Jeral began to fall into place. Jeral had only been on the Devil’s Broker for a short while. Kett and Mackie were friends of his. Together, they’d replaced the previous lift team. But of course a lift team had four members, and Braddock would have insisted they hire someone else. Jeral probably agreed to take on Noemi because he thought she was too naive, too new to interfere with his plans.
Jeral had been planning this for a while, it seemed. It had all been a setup. An inside job. And Jeral had used his relationship with Mayve to keep above suspicion. Maybe now SCO dar Bueil would consider slapping her third nephew twice removed with a protocol violation.
Braddock moaned again. She ran over to him and pulled back her hood, wanting him to see her face. He smiled, faintly.
“I knew you were a good hire, rookie.”
He’d always been decent to her, if reserved, and she’d appreciated his subtle nods of approval after a hard shift. She always stacked more cargo than the rest of her team, but Braddock was the only one to ever acknowledge it. That had been enough to keep her going.
Now his eyes were slits, his lips blue, his breathing shallow.
“Braddock!” she shook him gently. His techsuit was flashing a rapid orange, and a red circle flickered over his heart, slow and erratic, displaying his pulse.
He smiled faintly. “Rookie …”
“It was Jeral, wasn’t it?”
“Couldn’t see … hoods on …” He slumped back. It didn’t matter. She knew.
“Hell and starlight! I should have left that bastard in the trash where he belongs!”
Braddock’s eyes widened slightly, focusing somewhere over her shoulder. He grimaced.
“Take it easy, Braddock. Just rest.”
But he ignored her, lifting one shaking arm, his hand pointing back toward the bodies scattered behind her. A soft moan escaped his pale lips.
“They’re all gone, Braddock. I’m sorry. Just rest, okay?”
His hand dropped. She knew she was losing him. The red heart-circle was barely pulsing.
“Braddock!”
His techsuit turned a steady purple.
“No ….”
He was gone.
Noemi choked back a sob when she heard a voice behind her.
“Put your hands where I can see them, Miss Ochana.”
9
Privateers
Noemi recognized the voice immediately.
“Stand up now, Miss Ochana.”
Noemi turned, rising. Mayve stood behind her in a zero-atmo suit, her head uncovered.
The suit was clearly not hers, it was far too big. It sagged and bulged at the middle. The woman looked ridiculous, like an upright egg threatening to topple. Her nose and cheeks were bright red from the cold, and a drip of snot jiggled at the end of her nose. She held her suit’s helmet in one hand and a gun in the other.
The gun was leveled at Noemi.
A transport bot waited behind Mayve, its flat top piled high with expensive-looking luggage. Each bag, all in different sizes of fuchsia-colored fabric with animal-skin handles, was festooned with gaudy gold buckles engraved with the logo of some posh New Carthage fashion house.
“Mayve,” Noemi said. It wasn’t a greeting so much as a revelation. Of course—Mayve was in on this, too.
Mayve casually aimed the barrel of the gun at Noemi’s face. A flechette gun, standard issue for sector police and corporate security guards. Capable of firing sharp, ceramic rounds that could pierce a techsuit but were no danger to the metal walls of a station or ship.
“What are you doing down in Cargo, Miss Ochana? I thought I’d confined you to your quarters.” The woman was attempting to sneer, but the corners of her lipsticked mouth utterly failed to dent her frozen, pudgy cheeks.
“I came to my emergency meeting point, as required by ship’s protocol.”
“Don’t be cute. I thought you’d been given a medical suspension. And I’m quite sure I changed your status from employee to passenger.”
“Medical cleared me.”
“Did they now? Well, no matter.” Mayve looked Noemi up and down. “Where did you get that coat? I didn’t authorize a new one.”
“A … a friend.”
Mayve’s eyes narrowed. “It’s not your size. Who’s your friend? A man?”
Noemi said nothing, not wanting to risk getting Lilia in trouble. She decided to turn the tables. “It’s my coat now, Mayve. How about you? That zero-atmo suit clearly isn’t yours.”
“This hideous thing? It was his.” She waggled her gun at Braddock’s corpse. “Found it in his locker.”
Noemi gritted her teeth. “You killed him for his zero-atmo suit?”
“I never liked him, to be honest,” Mayve said. “Too much of a stickler for protocol. But no, I didn’t kill him. His was the first zero-atmo suit I found in the locker room, and I need it if I’m to go into the depressurized cargo bay. But someone really should be killed over these suits, don’t you think? They’re simply hideous! No sense of style at all.”
Noemi ignored her. “Who killed Braddock? Who killed all these workers?”
“It hardly matters now, does it, Miss Ochana? Too bad you didn’t stay in your room. You might have survived this.”
“It was Jeral, wasn’t it?”
“Who can say? Jeral? Kett? Mackie? I armed all three of them. These guns fire rapidly. It would be hard to keep track of who shot who.”
Noemi gaped at her. “Why?”
“Close your mouth, dear. You look like a fool. Frankly, I don’t see why he didn’t just kill you, too. But he wanted you safely in your quarters when this all went down. He always had a weakness for a pretty face.”
“Jeral wants me alive?”
“We’ll he certainly wouldn’t want you dead. He has strange tastes, but necrophilia isn’t one of them. I’ve already sold your debt package, you know. To a small holding company in Jeral’s name. He’s looking forward to having you as his … personal assistant once we’re off this ship.”
Noemi folded her arms defiantly. “That asshole’s not going to lay a finger on me as long as I’m alive.”
“Like I said, necrophilia’s not his thing. But your knowledge of what we’ve done here mustn’t get out. This is a pirate attack, after all.”
“Privateers, you mean.”
“That’s just piracy by another name, dear. Flying a corporate flag. But I’ll make it look like it was the usual, unaffiliated kind of pirates that hit the Broker.”
“Anyone can see this was an inside job.” Noemi looked around, wondering if she could make a run for the corridor on the far side of the Garage. She decided against it. She could easily outrun Mayve. But not her flechette gun.
“I’ve already wiped the ship’s vid feeds. Or, rather, the pirates did.”
Noemi’s mind was racing. “Who are you working for?”
“OuterZone GeoFrontiers, if you must know. OZ Geo, as it’s known out here. Rone Jotheront’s company.”
“Jotheront?” Noemi had heard that name, too. “Another of New Carthage’s corporate princes?”
A pained look crossed Mayve’s face. “Not long ago, I was OZ Geo’s vice president of Logistics and Transportation. Quite a high-ranking position. But we’d had a run of losses over the past decade. Pirates hit our freighters hard, mostly as a result of my bad routing decisions, alas. Rone gave me a choice—make that money back, or have my debt sold to the outer zone. Well, there was no way I was going to give up the life of a corporate executive! OZ Geo’s spies—yes, we have corporate spies, all the companies do—learned that ExoRok found a platinum-rich vein on Simova, one of Dacia’s rocky moons. It took some time, and some creative HR work, but I got myself hired by ExoRok to oversee their Dacia operation. Not many VPs willing to do a tour in the outer zone, so far from the luxuries of New Carthage.”
Dacia was the gas giant that Tiber Station orbited closest to. Its moons, Simova and twelve others, were thought to be fairly unproductive mining areas—mostly iron and nickel.
“So that’s what’s in those locked crates we’ve been stacking—platinum? The ones Jeral and the others are stealing?”
“Over fourteen tons of the stuff. Never a richer vein found in the entire System. It’ll put OZ Geo right back on top.”
Noemi was puzzled. “The Devil’s Broker is a Barstow-Class freighter. Those are the smallest ships in the fleet. It’s not armed nearly well enough to safely transport that kind of cargo. Why did ExoRok permit us to haul something so valuable?”
“Silly girl. I’m an ExoRok corporate VP, remember? I’ve been on Simova, overseeing the mining operation there. Transportation decisions are mine to make.”
“How long have you been planning this?”
“Years. ExoRok had that claim locked down so tightly, no other company had any idea what they’d found. They kept the operation small to not draw attention to it, even if that meant it took longer to pull out all the ore. They didn’t take the platinum off the moon. They just stored it there until it was played out. Then I arranged to have all that platinum transported on one small, lightly armed freighter. I made the argument from reverse psychology. After all, a heavy transport would just be begging to be attacked, right? Every pirate or corporate privateer in the outer zone would have their eyes on it. So I said, ‘Let’s ship it in a way that no one expects something precious to be shipped.’ Small scale, unobtrusive. Like the Cullinan Diamond.”
“The what?”
“The Cullinan Diamond. Centuries ago, back on Earth, the Cullinan was one of the largest diamonds ever found. It was sent from Africa to England to be added to the Crown Jewels collection. It was an irresistible target to thieves—everyone who wanted to steal it expected the British to ship it under armed guard. But that would tell the criminals right where to find it. So instead, the British government wrapped it in a small package and
simply sent it through the Royal mail, on a slow, small ship. Worked like a charm, got to London safe and sound. Of course, if the person who had come up with the idea of sending it through the mail was herself a thief, well then …”
“It would be easy to snatch. So, the Devil’s Broker is the little mail ship.”
Mayve gave a smug smile. “Exactly. Far easier for OZ Geo’s privateers to handle. One shot. Grab and go. I came on board as SCO a few runs back, just to make sure I had everything ready before we finally brought the platinum on board for this inner-zone run.”
“But how did they find us? We’re still a small freighter, probably one of dozens near Cassius Station.”
“When we stopped to dump the excess tonnage, we sent out a radio transmitter.”
“Wouldn’t they scan the ore slag prior to dumping? For anything that might give away our position?”
“Oh, the slag is scanned. But the trash isn’t.”
“The trash?” Noemi was confused. But only for a second.
Jeral. The trash chute. He was placing a transmitter!
Noemi shook her head. She really must have looked like a fool. She’d certainly been played for one.
Mayve smirked. “Enough. I really must be going. Turn around.”
Noemi did, facing the closed cargo bay door.
She heard the woman take a few steps toward her. “I am sorry to have to terminate your employment with ExoRok yet again, Miss Ochana.”
Noemi closed her eyes, tensing in anticipation of the flechette rounds piercing her back.
A sudden cry made her open her eyes. She heard a thump, like a heavy sack dropping, and turned around. Mayve was on her back in her oversized zero-atmo suit, eyes rolled back in her head. She moaned.
Someone stood over her, wearing a white techsuit with a red cross on the sleeve. The kind worn by nurses. Its hood was up. The figure held a fancy fuchsia makeup bag in its hand, gold buckles glinting in the dim emergency light.
“What does she have in here?” the figure said, hefting the bag by its animal-skin straps. “It’s heavy as hell.”