Valhalla Station

by Chris Pourteau

  “Amy died,” Kwazi said. “And Max and Mikel and Aika and Beren.”

  Telemachus released a breath. She glanced briefly at Stuart, then addressed Kwazi with slow speech. “Yes. And many others. The Resistance murdered them, Kwazi.”

  “Murdered,” he said, tasting the word.

  “But you and the others who survived—you’re heroes of the Company. You helped guide the rescue teams. You helped save lives.”

  That didn’t sound right. If he’d been a hero, why was Amy dead? Hadn’t she barely even been injured? His back-channel offered up her twitching hand as evidence. Why were any of them dead?

  “Did I?” Kwazi wondered. He didn’t remember saving anyone. In fact, he remembered not saving everyone.

  “Yes,” Telemachus said, her voice lined with impatience. “We’ve been over this many times.”

  Dr. Stuart cleared her throat, and Helena forced a smile as Kwazi looked at her. Her expression made him want to fade into the wall away from her. Every time he gazed into Helena’s piercing green eyes, he heard the seven words again, felt Helena’s cool hand on his arm, guiding him through the chilly room. Saw Amy dead, her body blue against the cold metal of the bed in Wallace Med’s morgue. It had made him sad and angry to see her there, naked under the examiner’s thin sheet. She hated the cold.

  Sometimes ripping off the bandage is best.

  “And now you can help them all again,” Telemachus said.

  “I’d like to help them,” Kwazi said, “but it’s too late.” What he thought was: I want Amy back.

  “It’s time to move forward now,” she pressed. “We can … we can honor their memory today.”

  I don’t want to move forward. I want to go backward.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Telemachus blinked acknowledgment to her sceye. “We’re on our way.” Turning to Kwazi, she laid a hand on his bare arm.

  So cold. Like Amy now.

  “It’s time to go, Kwazi.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  Rising, Telemachus pushed Kwazi forward, and the door slid aside. Tony Taulke’s baritone was winding up his speech with words like “Resistance” and “will not negotiate” and “terrible loss.” Helena led Kwazi up a short staircase just off stage. From behind a podium emblazoned with the five-pointed SynCorp star, Taulke gestured to an audience of handpicked citizen-workers. Camerabots shot him from various angles, spreading his speech across the solar system. Kwazi swallowed into a dry throat.

  “But, ladies and gentlemen, this story isn’t all sad,” Taulke was saying. “Amid the tragedy of that day on Mars, amid the blood and bedlam of wanton destruction, the true nature of the human spirit shone through. Heroes were forged. Heroes who helped others, who saved the lives of their fellow human beings. Those heroes represent the shining spirit that ensures our triumph over those who intend our Company harm.”

  Taulke turned, a broad, proud smile stretching the otherwise angular features of his face.

  “Helena, would you please?”

  Telemachus ascended the steps to the podium. Kwazi followed, hand in hand. When they reached the top, she led him forward.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this man is one such hero,” Taulke said. The lights from above forced Kwazi to squint. His legs felt made of rubber, but they held him up. “Kwazi Jabari selflessly put his own life in jeopardy to save others.”

  Did I?

  The back-channel of Kwazi’s brain moved his legs. He knew to stop next to Tony Taulke. This is what he’d rehearsed with Helena on the trip from Mars. How this would go, over and over again. He didn’t have to think about it, which was good. His muscles seemed to think for him.

  “Come closer to the podium, Mr. Jabari,” Taulke said, smiling. “See, folks? Even now he shuns the spotlight.”

  The lights were too bright, but Kwazi complied. His eyes had begun to adjust. When Taulke extended his right hand, Kwazi took it. More back-channel programming. More muscle memory.

  “Mr. Jabari, I want to thank you for your heroism. You embody the very spirit we encourage in our citizen-workers. You embody bravery. You embody initiative. You’re someone our children can look up to and admire as they enter the workforce.”

  A smile formed on Kwazi’s face. It felt odd, but it wasn’t something he could control. The lights, Taulke’s own smile, the firm grip holding Kwazi’s hand hard. It all seemed to demand that he smile in response. His cheeks trembled with the effort.

  “I say this as the man blessed enough to lead the Syndicate Corporation: without people like you, humanity would’ve succumbed to the consequences of its own avarice more than a generation ago. Thank you, Mr. Jabari. Thank you for showing us that the human spirit endures—no matter the circumstances. No matter the cost.”

  The crowd erupted with clapping, their voices raised in accolades for a man none of them had ever seen before. The smile slowly slid from Kwazi’s face.

  The cost.

  Taulke released his hand and looked past him. “Helena, can you join us?”

  Her face beaming, Helena Telemachus approached center stage with a small, square velvet case. She opened it.

  “Today, I’m bestowing upon Mr. Jabari the Order of the First Citizen. As I’m sure you know, this is SynCorp’s highest civilian award.” Taulke regarded him with a solemn expression and clapped a hand on Kwazi’s shoulder. “And more than well deserved. Helena?”

  She took up position opposite her boss, flanking Kwazi. Despite the open air of the auditorium and the vast crowd on the deck below, Kwazi suddenly felt hemmed in. The unreality around him thickened, crystallized. In the front-channel of his mind he felt he was about to be sealed into this new reality as the Hollow Man forever.

  Right here. Right now.

  That’s what this ceremony was for. Kwazi finally understood. And was terrified.

  Taulke removed the ribbon and medal from the box and held it up briefly for the people watching, those below and around the system. The air swelled with approval. The Syndicate Corporation’s CEO fastened the ribbon around Kwazi’s neck, then withdrew. Taulke swept his arm toward Kwazi, as if the Martian miner were newly minted, fresh off the assembly line to be admired.

  Kwazi looked down at his chest as Helena turned him gently to face the crowd. The embossed, generic, angular profile of a man looked back at him, upside down, from inside the Company’s five-pointed star. It might have been Caesar’s profile, but it more than resembled Tony Taulke. It made Kwazi feel small.

  “Every single one of you here,” Taulke was saying, “can look up to this man. You could do much worse than to emulate him. Good corporate citizens make for a strong corporation. And the Company will always take care of its own.”

  More applause. More shouts of corporate unity.

  “And one other thing,” Taulke said, quieting the crowd with his hands. “We’ll catch those who murdered your loved ones, Mr. Jabari.” He said it without looking at Kwazi. His eyes swept the crowd below and across the solar system via CorpNet. “We’ll bring them to justice. Your sacrifice—and their deaths—will not have been in vain.”

  A calmness descended over Kwazi with those words, coalescing around him like a second skin. Taulke stepped back from the podium and extended his hand again. When Kwazi took it automatically, Taulke pulled him in close.

  “You’re now my number-one ambassador to the Sol system. Don’t fuck it up.”

  Chapter 12

  Stacks Fischer • Valhalla Station, Callisto

  Stepping off the Cassini’s Promise was like being released from prison. The ship had started to smell funky with the uncomfortable closeness of people you don’t know well enough to know them that well.

  The artificial gravity, like everything else aboard, had been reliably half assed. My feet dragged coming down the ramp as I adjusted to Callisto’s state-of-the-art gravity generators. Another of Erkennen’s miracles, the rods that produced the g’s were built right into the deck and foundation alongside the rebar. Callisto pulled
a natural third-of-a-g, and Erkennen’s gravimetric enhancers—the semi-technical name for them—supplemented that. Like a thermostat, it could be dialed up and down. Lower gravity to make the heavy lifting lighter, normal gravity in the hospital to make sure blood clots. Variant Gravity Syndrome was a problem for some, and if you couldn’t get over VGS, space wasn’t for you. The Community Dome pulled a steady one-g, which kept Earth-evolved muscles from getting lazy and cut down on the Company’s medical and fitness budget. Low-g can cause all kinds of health problems, mental and physical.

  Above, Callisto’s orbital ring—where miners and materiel were transferred between shuttles and gashaulers—shone with the amber-orange light of Jupiter. A shuttle was docking, likely bringing in an off-cycle work crew from a gas platform in low orbit of the big planet. Mining happened ’round-the-clock. There was a scoopship right behind the shuttle, waiting to dump its cargo of Jupiter’s gassy gold, where they’d separate out the helium-3 and deuterium before they were hypercompacted into a gashauler and launched into the Frater Lanes for transport to the inner planets.

  It’d been a long time since I’d been to Callisto. A long time since I’d seen the Company’s arteries pumping like this. I’d gotten too used to shiny walls and aged scotch at The Slate. The last time I was here, maybe ten years before, SynCorp had still been recruiting pioneers for its second colonization attempt since the first one hadn’t gone so well twenty years earlier. See the Stars, Build a Future—part of Tony’s effort to brand the system for the Company. Valhalla Station had been much smaller then, cruder, and that was part of its charm for the roughhousers Tony recruited to homestead here. Now the community had three huge domes—residences, agroresources, the utility center—and looked like a truly civilized attempt at one giant leap for mankind.

  But the Promise was the only ship docked in the half a dozen slips, and she sure looked lonely. Only a handful of customs personnel were present. A big man with a beard drove a loader to the freighter’s slip, ready to pull seed and medical supplies and Earth luxuries for sale in the local market. I stepped out of the way. Other passengers streamed off the ramp, including my dinner companions from a few nights before. Jaxson and Haze. Allard and Annie, who made sure to wink my way as she passed. Jane Smith? Nowhere to be seen.

  I’d been trying to guess who she worked for since we’d had our verbal tennis match. If I was here on Tony’s orders, maybe another faction had sent its own fixer to solve the pirate problem. I’d be more surprised if they hadn’t. Or maybe she worked for the Bosswoman of Callisto, Adriana Rabh. In any case, I figured I’d be seeing Jane again soon enough.

  I joined the small crowd of claimstakers in the customs line. I flashed Sawyer Finn’s faked bona fides to the Company man and entered the station proper. Unlike dockside, the interior of the Community Dome was vital, alive. Citizens milled among the shops strategically placed along the boardwalk leading away from the port. They were cordial to one another, much more refined in their manners than a decade earlier. Valhalla Station had gone from selling furs on the edge of the tundra to a Western town with a promising future. It was like the mirror image of Earth’s own Moon, twenty years behind. Man’s first step there had started out this way, too. Shiny and new with the dreams of what mankind could accomplish. Now the Moon and its main city—now just called Darkside—were the backwater of the system, where the Company collected its refuse in the squalor of squandered potential. Made me wonder what Callisto would look like in another generation or two.

  A short member of one of those generations ran past me, followed by a girl in pigtails playing some game I’d forgotten about long before either of them was born. Neither of them seemed too worried about the future. Which is how it oughta be, I guess.

  “Real leather, handcrafted from our own livestock!”

  I turned to find a man advancing from a stall along the boardwalk. He was snapping the neck of a boot between his hands, twisting and stretching it.

  “Sturdier than the stuff they synthesize on Earth! Much tougher, like everything else out here, friend. Let me fit you a pair.”

  If I weren’t trying to stay low key, I would’ve questioned the man’s assumption that we were chums. With earnest, if not extreme, prejudice. But the over-the-hill miner I was supposed to be just held up my travel bag. “Nice boots. But I got all I need right here … friend.”

  “Oh, you’ll be back,” he said, sure of himself. “That inner planet shit falls apart out here. Made for walking the dog back home, not standing on rocks shaped by the gods. Mark my words.”

  I gave him half a grin. “Consider them marked. Now, can you direct me to the best bar on Callisto? I’m parched.” Six days of sobriety was five and a half too many.

  Boots seemed to hesitate. No one likes giving anything away for free on the frontier. I’d just remembered that old lesson. Different customs, different people out here. But he seemed to weigh the value of being friendly. Favors are like any other commodity. Tradeable.

  “Keep walking toward the center. This is the Market District. The Entertainment District is about halfway between here and Justice Hall,” he said, gesturing at the spire in the middle of the dome. It was five or six kilometers distant. “You’ll find everything you need to divert yourself there. You’ll just have step off the main drag once you cross into it. If you know what I mean.”

  I knew what he meant. I’d find the bars and whorehouses in the alleys behind the prettier facades of more family-oriented vid-centers and restaurants. If I wanted to find out about the seedier side of life on Callisto, I wouldn’t discover it over aperitifs in one of the upscale establishments. I’d find it across the alleys, where the drunks slept off their vice. Cards on the table, I’m way more comfortable stepping over drunks than dancing with socialites.

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “Come back for the boots!” he said to my back.

  The Promise had arrived at the end of a Jovian day. Jupiter hung as a permanent fixture in Callisto’s sky with its yellow-golden bands and its one angry, red eye. Plastisteel panels in the dome’s roof began to shade to true transparency, allowing the natural light from the big planet to shine through as if humans had never set foot here. The panels were programmed to signal the time of day via color manipulation, the Company’s attempt at regulating Callistans’ circadian rhythms with a tolerable approximation of Earth’s light cycle. Earth’s night has a silver sheen from her Moon, but here, it’s the planet that shines on the moon. Sunlight reflected from Father Jupiter, bathing Callisto in the warm browns of a bourbon sky. Night was coming on.

  More kids ran by me. One bumped into me, then bounced off again.

  “Sorry, Mister.”

  Shouldn’t they be getting home soon?

  “Forget it, kid.”

  He raced after his compadres.

  Tony wanted me to sniff around, not bull my way in, so I took my time strolling as the dome grew darker. Everything in a colony dome is designed for utility. Luxury is something you pay a vendor for. Translation: the corridors are cramped, with minimal width along the narrow streets. The Company encourages personal mobility, part of its Health First initiative. Healthy, happy workers are productive workers. No need for physical fitness centers when you have to walk everywhere to get anything.

  The streets slowly cleared out. Callistans wound down their day, retreating into apartments to cook family dinner. Shops began to shut down, but I was surprised to see no security gates descending over the storefronts. Then I reminded myself that stealing was always a rarity on Callisto. Valhalla Station had a fairly black-and-white code: do unto others all you want, but be prepared for the consequences. Communal judgment was swift, fierce, and non-negotiable.

  Everything on the frontier has a certain life-preserving urgency about it, even the most trivial things—like local-made boots. This wasn’t Earth, where everyone’s born with a silver planet in their mouth. This was one small moon revolving around a huge outer planet on the edge of nowh
ere. A wayward asteroid might punch through a hydroponic dome. The gravity generators might fail. The air processors might break down. The underground water supply might become contaminated by an alien virus. The people who made a life on Callisto weren’t scared by any of that, or if they were, they got over it quick or picked up their ball and glove and ran home to Earth. But that kind of life made for a pretty simple moral code, and most abided by it without complaint. Respecting and enforcing it are part of what held them together as a community. Callistans are a hardy stock.

  The Market District streets were nearly deserted by the time I crossed the border into the Entertainment District. I slipped past the more refined restaurants and diversion centers where families gathered and followed the singles to the more practical establishments off the main drag. The bootmaker’s advice was spot on. One of my rules in life: any place with a sign showing a bare-breasted, winged woman swinging a sword out front is worth a closer look.

  From the alley I heard a gasp. Aha! I’d found the business side of town, all right. I sneaked a peek and was surprised to find a young woman sitting alone in the alley muck. I’d expected to find a John nearby, or maybe she was the Jane paying for the pleasure from local talent. But nope, she was flying solo. She was young, with a thousand-yard stare. A lazy smile and lazier eyes. I took a closer look, but she didn’t notice. No drug paraphernalia I could see. Then I remembered Mickey’s short course on the latest escape: the hack you could buy for the SCI, the one that floated you away on your own endorphins to La-La Land. This girl was certainly enjoying her own imagination. She started to move her fingers in the direction of her fun bits, so I decided it was time for that drink.

  “Welcome to Valkyrie’s Perch,” a waitress said as I walked through the faux log door. She could’ve been the model for the sign out front. She certainly looked the part. “I’m Lagertha. What—or who—can I get you?”

  I inhaled deeply through my nose. Sweat, beer, and the underscent of too much beer, recycled. This was my kind of place. After nearly a week on a ship with the gall to have Promise in its name, I was finally beginning to feel fulfilled.