"Pre-Panhandler scientist. He worked out the theory by traveling to some weird islands on a boat called the Beagle."
Gomes took a moment to stare at him. "And you learned a thing like that where?"
"The School of Hard Knocks. Fortunately, it has pretty low entrance requirements."
"Beagle Station," she said, "was named after founder Richard Danson's beloved pet."
"A beagle."
"That was also named Beagle."
Webber decided the captain was being serious. "People get weird out here, don't they?"
"It's the lack of social accountability."
"Just wait until the first person makes it to Alpha C," he said. "They'll rename it Mittens."
Gomes snorted. Given how few conversations they'd had, Webber was certain it was the first time he'd made her laugh. He decided to leave the bridge before he spoiled the impression.
Back at his bunk, he buckled in. The ship came in at an angle, squishing his guts across an uncomfortable vector. Distantly, things clunked and whirred. His body lifted against the straps, suddenly in free fall; then he plunked down, pressed into his chair by the spin gravity. He unbuckled and headed to the airlock. The others filtered in, Jons and Vincent, Harry and Lara, Deen. No sign of the captain. The lock opened, feeding them into a rubber tunnel connected to the terminal. Inside the station, Webber got his first look at the modified profile of the Fourth Down.
It looked like a different ship. The irregularities of its hull had been smoothed out, particularly near its front, which was now nearly as wide as its butt. Stern. Whatever they called it. The wings were still there, but these had been blown out into blocky thumbs that might conceivably be extra stowage or living spaces. He didn't like it.
The terminal smelled like algae and strangers. Less water in the air than they were able to sustain on the ship. From an external perspective, they were docked on the underside of the auxiliary platform and the view past the station roof was dizzying: a thick cable climbing straight overhead, disappearing on its way to the two hammers a few hundred miles away. These appeared fixed in space, but beyond them, the stars streaked past like they'd just split their pants in front of their crush.
After passing security, which made a big deal of collecting everything remotely weapon-like, the crew piled into the elevator, which was fully transparent, obviously designed by sadists. As it whipped them upwards, they appeared to be floating in street clothes through empty vacuum. Webber closed his eyes, but that only made it worse.
Minutes later, with the head of a hammer looming above them, they braked to the point of free fall. The elevator entered the base of the station and glided to a stop.
The doors parted. A whiff of chlorophyll and loam whirled inside the elevator. Beyond, the ceilings were twenty feet high, a waste of space you could only afford in a foyer. Sunny light dispersed from the pale blue ceiling, showering down on the manicured shrubs and vines that pulled triple duty as park greenery, oxygen generators, and food.
"Gross," Jons muttered. He strode through the semi-circle of people waiting on the elevator. Webber followed.
Instead of a 24-hour Earth-style light cycle, Beagle kept each of its layers at a permanent level of illumination. The highest layer, with a skyward view of space, was deep night. After that, the second-highest layer was full "daylight"; as you descended toward the bottom of the hammer-head, it got progressively darker, until the second-lowest layer was back in full darkness.
Naturally, the bars, clubs, and hippest cafes clustered between Twilight and Midnight. Inevitably, the entirety of the crew (minus Harry) headed straight there.
First stop was the layer known as Sunset. Unusually wide streets between the buildings, some of which were painted to look brick. Webber was sure it was meant to evoke some Earthside city, but mostly it just looked Disney.
Jons had the best instincts for these things, so Webber followed him into a joint that was moderate in all ways: size, lighting, patronage. You didn't want your first stop too loud nor too dull. Could throw off the whole night.
Vincent, Lara, and Deen stuck with them. Even if he hadn't been the pup, Webber wouldn't have minded their presence. Deen was the hulking, quiet type; one glance at his forearms steered away trouble. Lara made it okay for women to approach them, and besides, she could match Jons shot for shot. Vincent had too many opinions about how the entire Solar System ought to be organized, and the drunker he got, the righter he became. But he was useful for running interference, and could keep the conversation going no matter the circumstances.
Jons, of course, was the one who made interesting things happen. Sometimes that meant trouble, but it was that or they might as well stick to their bunks and knit each other socks.
Jons insisted the first round of any stop be the local liquor. On Beagle, that meant something that tasted like licorice and bread mold.
"Next is on me," Vincent said, glancing across the table at the others. "Consider it my thanks for tearing through those hull mods."
"Wasn't much to it," Deen said.
"Right," Jons said. "Suit up, swim for hours on end, and do work that typically requires two certs and a diploma. No big deal."
"Must not have been," Lara said.
"Okay," Webber said. "Why?"
"You did it."
"I mean why bother changing up the Fourth in the first place? What did we accomplish with that?"
The four of them exchanged looks. Deen shrugged. "Bigger holds."
"Doubt it," Lara laughed. "Put anything heavier than a load of pillows in there, and the welds will rip off first time you try to turn. I say it's safety. A little more padding if we dock hot."
"You clowns," Jons said. "It's about looks. That ship is Gomes' baby. Her husband. Her ride. It's her. The way it looks reflects that. I cannot believe this is a serious question."
Webber looked around the table. A beat later, the others busted up with laughter. He smiled and bought the next round.
After that, they relocated to a place down the block, then dropped a level lower into Twilight, which was three times as rowdy. They were still feeling the cramp from the ship and quickly relocated to Last Light, where the ceiling was smudged with purple light and the people were downright demure, as if paying their last respects to the day. Vincent began to try his luck on the local girls. Next time Webber looked up, the man was gone.
When Jons suggested a descent to Midnight, Lara shook her head. "Not me. Too early in the trip for that."
Deen nodded his agreement. Jons raised his eyebrows at Webber. Webber was starting to get his stations legs under him and agreed without hesitation.
Midnight was actually two layers deep, but Jons stopped at Midnight-One, swinging into a bar Webber vaguely remembered from their last visit. Total crewman's bar where even the darkest-skinned people looked pale and nine-tenths of the crowd wore black clothes—not for fashion, but to better hide the stains. Jons plugged them into a booth, strolled to the bar, and returned with four doses of the moldy licorice-tasting stuff.
"What's up?" Jons said after the first was down.
"Nothing."
"Don't 'nothing' me. We bunk together. I can read you like you were my wife."
"I owe." Webber traced his finger around the rim of the full shot. "Money."
"Who doesn't? Why else would you be crewing?"
"On a house."
"A house?" Jons peered at him, brown eyes sharp with disbelief. "Tell me it's not on Earth."
He nodded. He hadn't meant to say it, but most of what got spoken in Midnight was that way. "It's not mine."
"Definitionally, I can't say I agree with you! Whose is it, then?"
"Complicated." Webber lifted the little glass. He knew the devil was inside it, but he drank anyway. "I've been doing a lot of reading. Back channels on the net. I hear that once you owe so much, when you pass the threshold…" He looked past Jons' shoulder. "You disappear."
"You disappear?"
Webber opened hi
s hands, revealing nothing.
Jons scrunched up his face. "Like they grind you into All-Paste?"
"They take you. Knock you out. You wake up in a hole on Triton, hauling rock. And that's where you stay until you die."
"If that were true," Jons said, "do you really think you'd have heard of it?"
As drunk as drunk logic got, but Webber was in the same headspace and had no trouble accepting it. "Maybe not. But the threshold, I'm coming up on it. And I don't want to see what's on the other side."
"Well hell, man. If you're that far underwater, what are you doing spending your money in a bar?"
They blinked at each other, then burst into laughter.
"It's never as bad as it seems," Jons said once they'd calmed down. "If it comes down to it, here's what you do. Cut a deal with Gomes. She reports you died in an accident somewhere off the Lane. A few months later, Bob Smith shows up on Titan. Boom."
The door banged open. A steroidal bald man entered, followed by two more men and a woman. All four were dressed in blue. The bald man headed straight to the bar, relocating several people along his way.
Webber turned back to Jons. "It's not as easy as that. Everything leaves a trace. If someone's looking for me and they see a smudge on the record, and they go check with Gomes about that 'accident,' how much pressure do you think it takes before she spills?"
They talked more, but Webber had accomplished his mission of turning his memory into a reverse terminator line, behind which lay only darkness. Next thing he knew, the bald man in blue was standing over another man so short and thin it looked like he'd been raised on a diet of imagination soup. Neither of them looked happy, but the bald man bore a fatalistic, half-amused expression.
"That," Jons said, "is the embryo of a fight."
The bald man's team was watching from their table, but between the noise, the gloom, and the booze, nobody else was paying much mind. The bald man said something. The short man shook his head. Before he finished, the bald man swung his fist.
If the measure of a punch was how hard it was to avoid, this one rated about an "Angry Toddler." The short man ducked, spinning away, lashing his left hand at the other man's balls. The little man's momentum was drawing him back, neutering his strike. But considering he was attempting to do just that to the bald man, it didn't take much.
The bald man dropped. As if connected to him by Newton's Third Law, the three members of his crew shot to their feet. The little man danced back. A bystander shoved him from behind, sending him reeling toward the crew. The woman stutter-stepped up and socked him in the cheek. He bounced back, tripping on a young woman as she scrambled to escape the burgeoning violence.
The bald man was still on the ground, thighs clamped tight. The blue-suited trio advanced.
Webber wiped his mouth. "Somebody should do something."
"Yeah," Jons said. "Little dude should run."
Webber downed the table's last remaining shot and found himself on his feet. Near the bar, the little man parried an incoming kick and swept the attacker to the ground. The woman came in from his side, driving her knuckles into his gut. This time, he fell.
The three standing members of the Blue Crew swarmed him, drawing back their feet. Webber burst through the ring of people surrounding the skirmish, fumbling out the Settler of Scores.
To both the naked eye and security scanners, the Settler of Scores was your standard-issue charge stick, a finger-sized portable power source whose universal ports could provide days of electricity for whatever gizmos you were carrying around. During a particularly rough stretch on Jindo, Webber had done some research, bought a few parts (one of which was quasi-legal at best), and converted his one and only charge stick into a much more versatile item.
The short guy had managed to kick the legs out from the paunchy guy, but the woman and the third guy were now giving him the ol' boots to the ribs. Now that the bald man was out of it, the woman looked like the nastiest contender, so Webber ran up on her, dug the charge stick into her back, and pressed the button.
A pattern of electric pulses discharged through the stick's needle-sharp golden pin. The woman went as stiff as an antenna, then dropped in a twitching puddle. The third man turned, mouth agape. The little guy slammed his heel into the side of the man's knee. The man's face got very serious. He fell beside the woman clutching a bundle of busted ligaments.
By this time, the paunchy guy had gotten to his feet. Regrettably, the Settler of Scores required a recharge/reset between uses, but Webber was feeling all right: it was now two on one in their favor.
The little guy pointed over his shoulder, crying out. Webber turned, glimpsing the bald man and a fist incoming straight at his jaw.
He saw stars. Not the fixed kind you saw on a starship monitor. These ones twinkled like crazy, alerting him that his brain was temporarily nonfunctional—and that more stars, comets, and darkness were soon to follow.
3
There was nothing Rada hated more than someone who flaked on a date. Sitting there, the scenery was pleasant to a fault—a real wooden booth with a clear view out the floor-to-ceiling windows, which displayed the curve of Mars in all its fiery glory—but she only had eyes for the clock. Her device. And its stubbornly empty inbox.
It didn't help that it was in Harrigan's. That's what her contact had requested, however, and given the nature of that request, Rada hadn't been about to say no. She could have lost herself in her device, as Simm was doing, but she forced herself to look at the bottles behind the bar. All the colors of the alcoholic rainbow: amber; green; rich, translucent brown. With one exception, it had been three years (and counting) since the murders on Nereid and hence three years (and counting) since her last taste.
Between then and now, she'd learned two lessons. The first was optimistic: mind trumped matter. Any internal problem was capable of being solved internally. You just had to want it. Hard enough to be ruthless with yourself. Over the last three years, she had starved that part of herself until it was little more than skin and bones in the back of a cage.
The second lesson wasn't so nice. She had starved it, weakened it to the point where she could toy with it without fear, but it was still there, wasn't it? That part of herself—the part that demanded more than the plain, unadulterated world could deliver—she didn't think it could be starved to death. It was a zombie. Weak, presently. But if she started to feed it again?
Darkness never truly went away. She should have known as much from the beginning. You were reminded of it every time you flipped off the light.
She checked her device for the ten thousandth time. Sipped her Fizzea, which had a hideous name but tasted wonderfully of tea and active bacteria. She people-watched. Gazed out the window on the dusty orange-brown sphere beneath them.
"I want to ping her," she said.
Simm didn't look up from his device. "Bad idea. Will seem needy."
"I know it's a bad idea. I said it out loud so I wouldn't do it."
He glanced up, scanning her. Eyes as blank as windows reflecting the sun. On the Spectrum of Unusual Personalities, he rated about a five, shading toward six: fully functional, but also capable of appearing inhuman. Robotic. Able to withdraw to a place of pure observation, untroubled by feelings or doubts. This creeped a lot of people out, but not Rada. It was a major factor in why they were together: she envied him. Tried to emulate his ability for herself. Didn't matter that she too often failed, blowing her stack at the worst possible moment. What mattered was that she made the attempt.
He came back to himself, personality returning to his eyes, and smiled at her. He looked back to his device.
She finished her Fizzea, stirred the straw around the melting ice, and waited to order another. She was finishing her third when the message came in.
It was total gibberish.
"Not necessarily." Simm frowned over his device. "It could be in code."
"For what, toddlers?" Rada laughed. "It sounds like a nursery rhyme."
"The words are arbitrary. An empty vessel for the real message embedded in the transmission."
"Or that." She slid from the booth. "Can you trace its source?"
He swept his fingers across the device's screen, scanning. "Maybe. It looks like it's been rerouted."
"Get cracking. I'm going to prep the ship."
"Isn't that premature?"
"Only if everything's okay."
He watched her a moment, descending back into scan mode, then dropped his eyes to the device. She jogged out of the bar and into the mall. The air smelled dry, and though it looked clean, it carried the odor of dust, too. Better than the sweat that pervaded most stations.
Ares Orbital was about as old as old got, but it had been retrofitted with artificial gravity a few decades ago. Mars-standard levels, though, meaning her hard jog felt like something she could keep up all day. Her haste was pretty stupid—whatever was going on with Kayle was surely happening very, very far away—but Rada couldn't help it. She might not be able to understand what the woman's message meant, but that in itself carried meaning. To her, the words sounded like someone who'd just been bashed on the head.
She hopped a shuttle to the port. Beyond the massive windows, the Tine rested on the tarmac, a scalpel among hammers. She still couldn't believe it was hers. Profile of a skiff with the engine of a cruiser. The perks of working for a billionaire. Check that: an eccentric billionaire. Then again, they all were, weren't they?
She'd already ordered a tube hooked up to its lock. At the gate, she scanned her thumb and eye and was allowed into the featureless tunnel to the ship. The lock opened and she stepped inside. When she was living on it, she never noticed the smell, but she'd been away from it for three days and easily detected the unique musk of Simm and herself.
Onboard, she put the Tine through its paces. Could have done most everything remotely, but she didn't trust the automation the way she trusted her own hands. She'd barely gotten started when Simm pinged her, letting her know he was on his way. He wouldn't say more.
She had everything spooled and humming by the time he arrived. Aggravatingly, they weren't cleared to launch for another forty minutes. They settled into the control deck, which was too large to be called a cockpit but too small for a bridge. Simm was fastidious about belting himself in and she knew better than to start asking questions until the last strap was clipped tight.
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