by Trevor Scott
The walls had originally been beige, but some of the paint had chipped off over the years and Liam had never felt compelled to fix it. Beneath the beige was the distinctive light gray of concrete. His kitchen originally matched the paint. Now, the countertops were faded and the tiny fridge’s door hung open. Liam had turned that thing off years ago when the hinge broke off. With food prices what they were it was easier to just eat at a dispensary.
There was a groan from underneath his bed sheets. Damn it! Liam had forgotten about her.
“Zeke?” the redhead under his covers asked. “Is that you?”
Liam crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. He tried to remember the night before but the pictures came in muddled and sparse. He’d met her at a dance club down the street. She asked him to buy her a drink and he obliged. She’d made it hard to say no. He always found it hard to say no. Her name was Amber? No. Ashley?
“I thought I said you could let yourself out.”
When he’d left her that morning, he’d had a feeling she would be a clinger. She had that look in her eyes the whole night. Relationship eyes. He had way too much on his plate to be dealing with a relationship. He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his sweaty blond hair, pulling his shoulder-length tangles behind his ears.
The redhead eyed him in a sultry manner. “I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye. You left in such a hurry this morning.”
“I got a call. Business.”
She took off the covers and Liam cautioned a glance. The redhead was wearing one of his old shirts and black panties that offset against her pale white thighs. He couldn’t help but be aroused, despite his objections to her wearing his favorite shirt. She tilted her head and examined his face in the light.
“What happened to you?”
“It’s nothing. Were you napping?” Liam redirected. “It’s five in the afternoon.”
“Give yourself more credit, last night took a lot out of me,” she said with a smirk across her lightly freckled face.
She sat up, hugging her knees, and toyed with a few strands of her long red hair. A part of Liam wanted to jump back into bed with her, but it would be his last act if he didn’t wire that money soon. Besides, he’d already given her the wrong idea once. He wasn’t a monster.
“You should go,” he said, snapping out of his arousal. “It isn’t safe for you here.”
“What are you talking about? I have you. You’re a cop. How much safer could I be?”
Shit, Liam thought.
Of course, he had to use the cop line last night, preying on a girl who desired an authority figure. Sometimes it was too easy. He stood up and scratched the back of his head.
“Right, but I’m working a big case,” Liam lied, unsure if he sounded convincing. “I’m undercover. It could be really dangerous for you, so you’ve got to go. I might have been followed back here.”
The redhead got out of bed and began searching for her pants. Her face flushed pink. Liam had a feeling his face had betrayed him. He never was a very good liar, at least when he was sober, a fact that made his jobs with Vesta far more difficult than they had to be.
“You know, you don’t have to lie to me,” she said as she slipped into her skin-tight black pants.
“What? I don’t—”
“I’m so stupid. Your name probably isn’t even Zeke. What the hell kind of name is Zeke, anyway?”
She took off his old shirt, revealing her small bare breasts, and fidgeted with her bra, which matched her lacy black underwear. The redhead knelt down and reached under the bed for her purple t-shirt, which she pulled over her head, fixing her hair afterward.
“Come on, you’re not stupid,” Liam assured her.
She grabbed her mismatched bag from the nightstand and stormed off toward the door, stopping before her hand reached the pad. She turned and crossed her arms, glaring at him intensely.
“You don’t even know my name, do you?”
Liam’s hands found his hips and he tilted his head to the side. It had been a long time since a woman had called him out like that. It wasn’t a feeling he enjoyed.
“Of course, I do...Ashley?” Liam guessed.
“Tiffany. God!”
She turned and pressed the button on the wall and the door quickly slid aside on its track. When she looked up, she was face-to-face with the tip of a gun. Tiffany dropped her leopard print bag and backed herself into the apartment. She made a number of sounds, including a few curses directed toward Liam.
In the doorway stood Takara along with two of her lackeys. She checked the sub-dermal implant in her hand, which projected up a spinning red hologram of the current time.
“Tick-tock, lover boy.”
3
“What are you doing here, Takara? I still have plenty of time.”
Takara entered the apartment with two thugs following closely behind her. They each stood a whole head taller than her and were dressed in stylish suits. They were what Liam thought of as the classy mob; agents of Vesta Corporation come to collect their credits. The one to Takara’s left was completely bald, eyebrows and all, with an implant covering one of his eyes and glowing red in the half-light. The other was a burly black man with a close-cropped haircut and a scowl that said it all. Liam couldn’t make out any implants, but he doubted the guy needed any.
Takara continued forward even after her lackeys stopped just inside the doorway.
“I grow impatient, thief. Transfer the credits now.”
Liam shook his head and put his hands up defensively.
He conceded, “Okay, Takara, you win. It’ll just take me a minute.”
He shuffled to his plain, beige kitchen and opened a drawer, reaching inside. The cracked wood inside the drawer gave him a splinter as he rustled his hand around until he found what he was looking for. Takara stepped closer to Tiffany and pressed the tip of the barrel to her head. “Ah, ah, Kidd. Don’t you cross me.”
Liam released the grip of his gun and grabbed his chip reader instead, closing the drawer and holding it up for her to see. He walked toward her, scanning a chip in his forearm with the reader as he did. The reader was a skinny metal device with a small screen and an infrared sensor at the tip. It read his ID chip, which linked to his bank account, displaying his account balance on the screen. It read just a few credits over five thousand.
“Give it to me,” Takara ordered.
Liam handed her the device and she scanned the chip in her gun-wielding arm.
She passed the device back to him and said, “Fingerprint.”
Tiffany’s eyes darted between Liam and Takara. Her lips trembled and speech evaded her. Liam tried to use his eyes to tell her it would be okay. He doubted if the message was conveyed.
Liam pressed his thumb down on the scanner’s screen and the credits transferred. He showed her the display, waiting until she was satisfied before tossing the device on the countertop. Liam placed his hands on the grubby counter and leaned forward.
“So, about that payment plan,” Liam began.
“Let’s start with a down payment,” Takara said, pulling the trigger of her pistol and sending a concentrated burst of energy through Tiffany’s skull. Her thin, lifeless body crumpled to the ground, the noise from the blast echoing out into the hall.
Liam was petrified. Tiffany might not have meant anything to him romantically, but she was still a person. A nice girl. Takara had gone too far. Liam never meant for anyone else to get in the middle of his backwards affairs. He felt bad enough about the previous night, and now this.
“You have two choices, Kidd,” Takara said while casually stepping over Tiffany’s body with a sultry walk that would turn heads in a gay bar. “I have my boys knock you out while I call the police, telling them I heard you arguing with your girlfriend, or, you can come with me.”
“Come with you where?”
“I hear they always need help on the Asteroid Belt.”
“Are you crazy?”
“You can choose to go down for murder, but that’s your choice,” Takara said with a sinister smile. “Choose quickly.”
Takara signaled her henchmen, who advanced on Liam. He took a step back, glancing down at Tiffany’s body and the thin trickle of blood seeping from the hole in her forehead. Vesta Corporation had enough power to rig a murder trial. Takara wasn’t lying. They could even produce false witnesses from the building. Neighbors he’d known for years. Everyone had a price. Everyone.
Liam nodded, more to himself than to anyone else.
“All right. What are the terms?”
“Ten years on the mine. Your pay will be reabsorbed by Vesta Corporation, for tax reasons of course. After which, you’ll work for Vesta for free in perpetuity. You’ll be provided the basics to live, of course, nothing more.”
Liam looked around his apartment in disgust. It was one of the oldest buildings in the city and in disrepair. The ‘perks’ of his freedom amounted to poverty. Still, a first-degree murder sentence would be for life, and the prisons were not much better than the mine. At least he’d have a chance at the mine.
“All right, Takara, I’ll go quietly.”
Her henchmen took his arms behind his back and steered him from the apartment. Takara closed the door behind them and led the way down the hall. Liam noticed a tattoo creeping up Takara’s back, revealed beneath the straps of her leather top. A tiger and dragon were locked in battle in the intricately detailed but monotone artwork. Takara turned her head and caught him looking.
“In Japan its meaning is known even to children.”
“Yakuza,” Liam mumbled.
“Once, and always.”
Liam let himself smirk. “But Vesta owns you now.”
Takara spun around and grabbed Liam by the neck, forcing him into the wall. Her fingernails dug in, reopening her claw marks from the street and sending droplets of blood down his neck where they quickly soaked into his shirt. She was too powerful for her size, with a glare forming across her face that was at least as frightening as her disproportionate strength.
“Nobody owns me,” she declared. “You’d do well to remember that.”
She released Liam’s throat and took off toward the elevator. The bald henchman shoved him forward, pointing and grunting for him to follow her. Once inside the lift, Takara turned to Liam and smiled, her cybernetic implants scrunching to the side of her cheeks unnaturally, contorting her otherwise beautiful face. “You’ll learn your place, Kidd, and maybe even one day earn your place in the fold. You’re going to enjoy the Belt.”
4
2145 A.D. – One Year Later – Vesta Mining Craft, The Asteroid Belt
Liam Kidd sat in the mess hall devouring his lunch, which consisted of miscellaneous meatballs and a kind of pasta made from soy. The fare was always strange on the Belt, but he’d learned to eat it quickly to get by the questionable taste. He spun his fork around, twirling up a bundle of pasta, and took a big bite, swallowing more than he would have liked while avoiding chewing the strangely textured food.
The mess hall was fairly tight given the number of miners present. It was just a half dozen tables and a wall of screens capable of projecting hundreds of scenes from Earth. Today was a green forest rife with moss, morning dew, and a thin stream trickling over the smooth stones of a riverbed. Liam preferred the cityscapes.
The mining craft was nearly two kilometers long and had attached itself to one of the larger asteroids in the belt, its small gravity field acting on the ship and providing at least a partial sensation of Earth-like gravity. The ship was able to produce its own field, but the technology wasn’t nearly as effective as the real thing. The combination of the two forces left Liam feeling a little lighter than on Earth, but not too far off from normal. He’d stopped noticing after a few weeks at the mine.
Across the table sat a pretty Latina woman named Saturn Vera, poking at her meatballs with a disgusted look on her face. She was dressed in a tight gray jumpsuit, similar to his own, the zipper pulled halfway down her chest and revealing a low-cut white tank top underneath. Her honey caramel complexion was flawless and she wore little makeup as it was hard to come by on the Belt. She was in her late twenties but retained the figure she had when she was in her late teens. They’d known each other for a few years doing various freelance jobs for Vesta Corporation. Meeting her on the mining craft was a stroke of luck to say the least.
Saturn regarded him with warm brown eyes and shot him a smirk. Her high cheekbones became even more pronounced when she smiled, her voluminous lips curving seductively whether she wanted them to or not. Saturn kept her dark brown hair pulled back tight in a high ponytail while on the mine, but Liam remembered a time when she put a lot more care into her looks. Personal appearances tended to go out the window when working long shifts at the mine.
Saturn held up a forkful of unclassified pinkish meat and asked over the buzzing voices of nearby inmates, “What do you think this is?”
“I’m sure it’s some kind of nutritional goldmine,” Liam said. “Just eat it.”
Saturn frowned and took a mouthful, swallowing it only after glowering a second more. Her dark brown hair had been about shoulder length when she arrived six months before, but it had grown fast.
“In Argentina we would never eat something so bland.”
“How would you know?” Liam replied. “Aren’t you from Mars?”
Saturn huffed and returned to her meal, spinning her fork around in circles to avoid putting another bite into her mouth. The fork stopped and she regarded Liam. “You know, the Vera women have resided on the Martian Colonies for generations, but we’re still proud Latinas. I am Argentinian first.”
“And I’m a Viking,” Liam said with a grin.
Saturn clenched her jaw and stabbed a meatball violently.
Liam remembered the lunar run they made a few years back. If it was possible, she was even more beautiful now. He tried to remember what went wrong between them before. She could be an abrasive person, but he liked that about her. Saturn was a mercenary who had a bit of a reputation at all of the seedier locations on Earth. She took any job if the money was right and she didn’t take sides. Saturn was looked at as more of a force of nature than anything else. She had a way of staying off people’s hit list that Liam envied. Looking at her now, he had a feeling why.
“You know,” Liam began, “You never did tell me how you got stuck here. Isn’t it about time?”
“Some things are better left unsaid.”
Liam took a sip of water from his brushed steel mug, setting down the cup and shooting her a goading look. “It’s been six months since they brought you in, Saturn. We’ve worked twelve-hour days in the same section of the factory, ate all of our meals at this same table, and we even sleep in nearby bunks. Whatever darkness you’ve got in your past you can tell me. In fact, I’m sure I can top it. Remember the Dauntless?”
“Leave it, Liam.”
Saturn stabbed another meatball with her fork and shoved it in her mouth, chomping angrily. Seeing her mad wasn’t much of a shock. She’d been on edge since she arrived. She was completely different than their time together freelancing. Over the course of a few jobs they’d spent months cooped up in a small spacecraft. Back then she was cheerful, telling jokes and flirting back and forth. Now she was a shell, going through the motions as though for posterity’s sake.
That said, Liam wasn’t in much of a position to talk. Being on the mine for a year had certainly changed him. He often woke up in cold sweats, the same recurring dream etched into his mind. Tiffany was standing before him, bleeding from the head where the energy pulse had hit her. She kept asking him why he’d let her die. Liam never had an answer for that.
“Do you think we’ll finish programming the spider bot today?” Liam asked, changing the subject.
Saturn briefly looked up from her meal and grunted. She wasn’t exactly the face of eloquence in that moment. After the noncommittal grunt she was back to her meal, pi
cking at it more than anything else.
A beefy Asian man sat his metal tray down at their table and plopped down next to Liam. The top half of his gray jumpsuit hung down past his waist, his grease-stained white tank top stretched to its limit to accommodate his muscles. He turned his thick neck and acknowledged Liam before focusing his attention on Saturn, his eyes moving back and forth from her face to her ample breasts unabashedly.
“Hey, Saturn,” the beefcake said. “How about we sneak into the observation deck tonight? Midnight sound good?”
“Piss off, Ju-Long.”
“Is she always this shrill?” he asked Liam.
Ju-Long Ma was an engineer, though he didn’t look it. He worked on the mining craft’s engines and was supposed to be a genius. For the most part, Liam had only seen him hitting on women and fermenting alcohol under his bunk. He called it Starlight, which was a stupid name because it was just moonshine. Still, he must have had some success with it or he wouldn’t have kept making it week after week.
“Now’s not the best time,” Liam replied, making a shooing motion with his hand. “Run along.”
“Ah, that time, I get it,” Ju-Long said, reaching his hands flat across the table to get Saturn’s attention. “If you need anything, Ju-Long is here for you. My grandfather taught me an ancient Chinese remedy just for this type of occasion.”
Saturn raised her fork up in the air and stabbed his hand, simultaneously flipping her tray over on him and covering him with the goopy soy pasta. Ju-Long cried out, standing up and cradling his hand in horror.
“Bitch!” he yelled.
Saturn got up and moved around the table, approaching him as though apologetic. Liam could see right through her farce. She gripped the fork, which was still lodged in the back of his hand, and yanked, sending a spurt of blood onto the table. The droplets barely missed Liam’s jumpsuit.
