Rogue Stars

by C Gockel et al.

  She caught the driver’s eye in the rear view mirror. He looked suspicious—as well he should be. Two train hands would never pay for a cab from the suburbs to the capital proper—they would have taken a hover bus. The man met her gaze in the mirror. “Port of Call?” he said.

  Forcing her voice down an octave, hoping it didn’t sound too contrived, Noa said, “Yes.”

  He stared at her a moment. Turning his head, he spit out the window. Noa’s heart beat so fast that her ribs hurt. She was dimly aware of James slipping the damn protein bar into his pocket and his hand going to the latch of the door.

  The driver grunted. “I want to be paid up front.”

  Noa’s body relaxed, and then stiffened again when he said, “Seventy credits, no less.”

  It was highway robbery. The driver spat again. Noa ground her teeth, but she slipped out the credits and handed them to the man.

  Without a word he set the cab into gear. He didn’t look frightened, as presumably he would be if he recognized Noa or James from the “tee-vee” broadcasts. Her eyes narrowed. Or maybe he just knew the Luddeccean alien-devil spiel was lizzar excrement?

  Sitting back in her seat, her gaze met James’s. His hand was still on the handle of the door. He kept it there for the entirety of the trip.

  Seventeen minutes later, they stepped out of the hover cab into the hot, humid air of Prime’s Port of Call district. As the hover lifted away, Noa surveyed the surroundings. Port of Call was between the train yards, the Tri-center’s spaceport, and the sea port. It looked almost exactly as she remembered it. Squat pastel-colored stucco buildings lined the narrow two-lane street. None of the buildings were taller than four stories; all had deep-sloped overhangs, to block the tropical sun and prying eyes from windows that were most often open to the breeze. Almost to a one, they had gleaming spiral windmills on the roof that by day drew energy from the wind and sun, and by night still derived power from the ocean breezes. A few had hover parking on their rooftops. Since they’d left the train, cloud cover had moved in. She felt a gentle drop of rain on her cheek and lifted her eyes. From where she stood, she could see the silhouette of the Ark, the vessel the first Luddecceans had arrived in, rising up in the direction of the Tri-Center. Built like the space shuttles of the twentieth century, but far more massive, the Ark looked like a mid-rise apartment building or warehouse, not a spaceship. A planet-wide monument and museum, it was lit from within and appeared reassuringly normal. However, there would usually have been a steady stream of ships leaving the spaceport behind the Ark, tonight the sky was dark. Feeling a rising sense of unease, Noa took a deep breath. Port of Call smelled like salty air and hover exhaust, but the normal smell of sun-baked garbage was absent. Dropping her eyes, Noa exclaimed under her breath, “Where are the rats? There should be rats.”

  “No, there shouldn’t be,” James said, sounding professorial. “They’re an invasive species. They’ve destroyed huge swathes of the local ecosystems, spread disease, and … ”

  “And they’re disgusting,” Noa said. She blanched and stuck out her tongue. “Creepy, naked tails. I know some people say they make great pets, but get your hand bitten once, or find them gnawing on human corpses … ” She sucked in a breath. Rat bodies writhed like so many snakes in her memories of the abandoned asteroid mines around Six … she shivered. “I convinced the captain of the last ship I was on, to keep a bunch of kittens because of the rat problem.” And because kittens were cute.

  “I was going to say—”

  Noa waved a hand. “That’s not the point. In this part of town they should be practically coming out here and saying hello.” Cheeky little beasts. Voice hushed James said, “Just about every totalitarian regime gains power by solving some problems.”

  Noa shoved her hands into her pockets, although the night was warm. “I never thought not seeing rats would make me uneasy,” she muttered. She looked down the street. She didn’t see the usual prostitutes, and there were fewer land cars than usual. There were plenty of people … yet fewer than normal.

  Beside her, James said, “The meteor shower continues.”

  Noa raised her face to the cloudy sky and saw pinpricks of light shooting through the clouds, exploding before they collided with the earth—but still, far too low.

  Movement not sixty meters away caught her eye. Wiping a few raindrops from her face, she saw men in Local Guard uniform inspecting the papers of some nervous-looking civilians. Ignoring the natural fireworks display, Noa grabbed James’s arm, guided him down a nearby alley, and then down another. She hadn’t let the hover pilot drop them off too close to their destination. In the event he reported them, she didn’t want their path to be too obvious.

  She turned left and walked under some clothes clipped to a line being rapidly pulled in by an inhabitant in the flats above. Her head jerked up at the plain white men’s shirts and women’s slips. They looked like things she had sewn at the camp. It was startling to see them out of the context of Taser-wielding guards and the drone of sewing machines. It was also strange to see them line-dried. She shook her head. Even simple devices had become ethernet dependent over the last few hundred years. She shouldn’t be too surprised that newer laundry machines no longer functioned.

  Resuming her path, her eyebrows lifted as James ripped open another protein bar. “You’re unusually quiet,” he said, before practically inhaling the thing.

  “I’m focusing,” Noa said, which was the truth … but not the complete truth. They had murdered a train worker. By the smell of the Root on his breath, he’d been in the cow car desperately sneaking a chew. He hadn’t deserved to die. There had been one civilian death in her revolution already. Her eyes slipped to James. She was certain he hadn’t meant to kill the man, but she thought of him ripping the lock from the cattle car’s metal door, and the way he’d peered down his perfect nose at it and suggested he’d been able to do it because it was rusted. He didn’t know his own capabilities … which made him dangerous, like a child with a loaded weapon. She closed her eyes. She’d have to deal with it later. They had perhaps an hour before the team in the train car would be discovered.

  At last, she reached the place she had in mind. She guided James down a dark stairwell to a nondescript black door. She knocked a few times, keeping her chin down and her cap pulled low so the security camera didn’t get a clear view of her face.

  For a too-long moment, nothing happened. “Does this place have a name?” James whispered.

  “Hell’s Crater,” Noa muttered, keeping her chin dipped and her voice gruff.

  “And I thought we were just going to hell in the figurative sense,” James muttered. Noa smirked, glanced up at him, and realized all of the dust had washed off his face in the rain—and probably off her face as well. Just as she realized that, the door swung open.

  Adjusting her shoulders, trying to appear broader, Noa stepped in with James. She was briefly blinded by lights as bright as the Luddeccean interrogation room. As her eyes adjusted, Noa saw a burly guard she fortunately didn’t recognize. He was standing behind a podium with a thick open book, partially blocking a short hallway that led to some more stairs. Noa thought she made out mug shots on one side of the book’s pages and a list on the other. Her stomach sank. But she took the pack she was carrying off her back and put it in some lockers just before the podium. She motioned for James to do the same. In her pack were the stunners, and James’s pack contained his rifle, carefully disassembled. They’d be nearly defenseless, but it couldn’t be helped.

  “Sorry, guys,” the guard barked. “I gotta see your IDs.”

  Noa swallowed. This was not normally the sort of place where IDs were checked … and even if the dirt of their disguises hadn’t been washed away by the drizzle outside, they never would have passed muster in the bright light of the hallway. Her eyes flitted to James. His chin was dipped low, eyes on the security guard, and she could feel his readiness to fight.

  Noa took a deep breath and made a leap of fait
h. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out the billfold-like ID and handed it to the guard. Turning to James, she jerked her head in the guard’s direction. Thankfully, taking the hint, he handed his ID over. The guard looked at the pictures in his hand, looked at them, and down at the pictures again. He looked over at the book, and ran his fingers over the names.

  “These IDs check out,” he said, head bent over the podium. Not lifting his eyes, he said, “The pictures look old.” He handed the IDs back, still not looking at them. “You might want to have them updated.” He coughed into his hand. “We get some slack for being a Fleet establishment, but sometimes, the Local Guard checks in here.”

  Noa nodded, and said, “We understand. Thank you.” She wasn’t sure if the guard recognized her—but she was sure he knew the IDs were fake.

  Turning to James, she said, “Come on,” and led him down the hallway to the dark descending stairwell beyond. She noticed that the hologlobe that usually played a Fleet recruitment recording in the hall was gone, as was the two-dimensional old time recruitment poster that used to hang on the ceiling above the stairs. A chill descended on her, even though the hallway was as hot and humid as it had been outside.

  Beside her, James whispered, “He lied … he lied for us. I can’t believe it. Although … there is a wonderful little-known account of a mixed-race man living in Nazi Germany, titled Destined to Witness. He was saved by purposeful acts of disambiguation by—”

  “James,” Noa hissed as a man appeared at the foot of the steps, a wave of sound from the room following as he did. “Shhh ...”

  “Ah, right,” James said, stepping to the side to let the man pass.

  Noa could hear music thumping as they approached the bottom of the steps and the heavy metal door that separated the stairwell from the club. The humid smell of the hallway was replaced by a hint of Root and tobacco. James bumped Noa’s shoulder with his. “Have I ever entered a more wretched hive of scum and villainy?”

  Noa snapped, “These are mostly former Fleet personnel!” There were a lot of veterans on Luddeccea. The planet may have been ambivalent about joining the Republic, but Luddecceans were over-represented in the military, and especially over-represented in the ranks of grunts. If you were a Luddeccean from a lesser family, Fleet was the way to go. Luddecceans made great spacers; they were used to hard work and doing without. And Luddeccea’s only recent conquest of native pathogens meant that Luddecceans were accustomed to living with the risk of death. She felt protective of her fellow “Luddie” veterans. They were her people, more than other spacers or Luddeccean civilians. She glared up at James.

  His eyes narrowed, and his jaw twitched. “I was trying to lighten the mood.” One of his eyebrows lifted. “I was under the impression you liked that sort of thing.”

  Noa squeezed her eyes shut, remembering the movie he’d mangled the line from. She’d missed the joke in his deadpan delivery. Timothy would have been blushing from hairline to neck, and biting a smile to keep from laughing aloud. He wasn’t Tim. She released a breath. Not meeting his eyes, she nudged him with her shoulder. “Yeah, thanks. It was funny.”

  “Please, contain your mirth,” he said dryly.

  The wryness of his tone made her smirk. Putting her hand on the door latch, she said, “Now let’s try and find someone I recognize, who can play programmer for us.” She swallowed. “Without us being recognized.”

  Turning his head to her sharply, James said, “You said no one from Fleet would be likely to turn us in.”

  Wincing, Noa looked up at the ceiling. “Well, almost no one.” Without waiting for a response, Noa opened the door and stepped into the room beyond.

  Hell’s Crater was almost exactly as Noa remembered it. Smokey and badly lit, it smelled like too many bodies and spilled drinks. But when her eyes grazed the crowd, she saw that things were different. It wasn’t as full as usual. The hologlobe at the bar’s end wasn’t playing live sports; it was playing an old holodrama instead. And when she peered into cubbies and nooks, her eyes actually went wide with shock. Some of the patrons were linked to each other via cables. Hell’s Crater wasn’t stuffy, but it also wasn’t the sort of establishment where this sort of thing usually went on.

  Normally, direct neural interface communication was achieved by ethernet; but, with the ethernet down, cables or “hard links” could substitute. Noa felt a near-constant desire to link, but she didn’t feel compelled to hard link. There was more risk involved in linking with hardware; it was easier to catch a bug of the biological or electronic variety. Also, the ethernet relay stations for thought transmissions had built-in gates to help keep errant thoughts and emotions from slipping through. With a hard link, the nearly subconscious observation that your data partner had nice biceps would be transmitted straight to his brain. And the way human brains worked, that observation was likely to be followed with thoughts even more explicit. Sex was so often a result of a hard link that “hard linking” was a metaphor for sex. Noa had some Fleet apps installed to provide filtering for her own thought transmissions; however, the apps couldn’t shield her from a stranger’s musings.

  Realizing she probably looked like a kid who’d just found porn playing on her grandmother’s hologlobe, she smoothed her expression. Squinting in the gloom, looking for someone she recognized, she saw a few hard linkers were smiling a little too broadly, eyes rolled back in their heads. A hard linked woman in one of the booths began to visibly moan, her mouth agape and eyes glazed. Her partner grunted, his hand beneath the table, his arm moving furiously. Noa had seen more explicit antics on some of her shore leaves, but nothing like it at Hell’s Crater. She shook her head—so why now? The security guard’s words came back to her. “We get some slack for being a Fleet establishment.” She sighed. They were here because they didn’t have anywhere else to go. She looked around the bar to see how the other patrons reacted. Some of them were laughing and pointing; others were shaking their heads. She noticed a man at a table directly across from the couple; he took credits from a man and then handed him a hard link. Noa’s eyebrows shot up. Apparently this was where people came to buy hardware; that would explain the festivities. Her eyes narrowed as she inspected the seller. He was wearing a glowing necklace. The necklace lit Eurasian features that were more perfect than James’s. He’d definitely had work done ... also not typical of this place. Fleet people were more likely than Luddecceans to have plastic surgery for major scars—but “pretty” wasn’t an ideal. Just before she turned away from the man, he caught her gaze. His eyes widened a fraction, and he lifted his glass in her direction and leered. Noa’s stomach churned.

  Beside her, James whispered, “You know him?”

  Noa stepped toward an empty booth in the corner. “No, but he makes my creep detector buzz.”

  “Is that an app?” James whispered in her ear.

  Noa had no idea if he was joking, which made it funnier. Covering what had to be a goofy grin with a cough, she slid into the booth and tried to observe everyone discreetly. James had just taken a seat across from her when the door flew open. The guy they’d passed on the way up the stairs lunged in, eyes wide, shouting something into the din. Noa couldn’t hear the words, but she could read his lips: “Patrol!”

  The holo went silent, but the noise in the room increased. There were a few cries, a few shouts, and around them people started yanking cables from their ports. James lurched to his feet, and Noa did, too. Other patrons were already ahead of them, running to the back door, but before Noa had slid out of the booth, the door in the back burst open and men in Luddeccean Green blocked their exit.

  Noa’s eyes darted across the room, looking for a place to hide. There had been a time when alcohol was prohibited on Luddeccea. Maybe there was a hideaway behind the bar?

  “Noa,” James hissed. Her eyes snapped to him—he was staring at someone not two steps from the table.

  7

  James’s muscles tensed. He heard shouting and saw people dropping hard links to t
he ground as they pressed in a mob toward the exits. A part of his mind noted the anomaly of it—hard linking wasn’t illegal in the Republic. It was necessary for psychotherapy or neural interface repair. It was, however, typically found to be in poor taste in public places. He remembered half-seriously suggesting to a girlfriend that they hard link in the backroom during a particularly tedious event. She’d suggested he go hard link himself.

  At the same time his mind processed these thoughts, his eyes remained fixed on the “creep.” The man blocked their exit from the table—fortunately, he also effectively blocked the Guard’s view of Noa and James. Hands in the pockets of a long trench coat, the stranger looked James up and down without ever meeting his eyes, and then he looked at Noa and smiled.

  Her eyes narrowed at the man. “Do I know you?”

  James heard footsteps on the stairs, and shouts of, “This is an ID check, stay calm!” James’s eyes darted around the room, looking for an escape, but he heard the Guard at both exits. For a brief moment his vision went black. They’d run through a blizzard, fallen into a gorge, crashed into a canyon wall, hidden in a magni-freight car … this couldn’t be their end … not in a bar. But of course it could be; it was magical thinking to suppose otherwise.

  There were whispers and screams, and someone cried, “Dear God, dear God.”

  More magical thinking. But what was the alternative? James told himself they would get out of this. His vision returned, and he was once more staring at the stranger, but he couldn’t move. He was frozen in place, his mind scrambling for a viable course of action and finding none.