by T Q Chant
A moment later Traver’s voice came back on. “Don’t worry, Sam, we won’t leave you behind.”
She sighed. “Copy that, Commander. Commencing search of local area.” She killed the channel. She keyed a countdown on her pad with two alarms, one for the check-in and one for the point of no return, and set it to display in bright red numerals on her helmet visor.
“Should never have left Earth. Should never have gone legit.” Not that she’d had much choice – her life on the edge of society back home was what had forced her into the Army, and misdeeds during her service had forced her out here.
Now she’d made contact with the lugger and established at least the possibility of them returning for her, she was less hurried. She secured the pack in the reception area, plugging it into a charge point to suck up some solar energy, then went through the building methodically. Her impression that life here had been abandoned in a hurry was only reinforced by the search.
“Definite signs that the colony site was evacuated,” she recorded on the pad, ready to burst transmit to the lugger. “Scratch that – people ran. Lights have been left on – solar and wind power grid is still in operation, at least in the admin building. I'm seeing pads just dropped and not shut off or locked. Somebody did take the time to disconnect the communications array from power.”
She gingerly eased the door to the administrator’s office open, sweeping the space with the muzzle of her weapon as she entered. It was surprisingly tidy in here, the desk still neatly set out with the pad still locked down in the middle of it, a precise scattering of ornaments, mementoes and a single holopic of a smiling family. The stacks said the chief administrator was ex-military.
“Would never have guessed,” she muttered sourly. She stabbed at the power key on the pad and got a ‘this is passworded, bugger off if you don’t have the key’ type message in hard-edged red letters. No note or anything in hardcopy. Not even any particular sign that anyone had cracked out of here in a hurry.
“No immediate clues in the admin building, moving on to a wider search of the area.”
The morning winds had died down a bit, but she left her goggles on, both to keep grit out of her eyes and to allow targeting interface. The helmet wasn’t milspec but had enough going on in it to make it more than ornamental.
The place was really beginning to creep her the fuck out.
The colony was arranged in a neat grid, grit paths between the prefabs. At the centre was the town square with the admin building on one side, facing the smaller but sturdier colony security office. Remembering her very basic infantry training, she skirted the outer edge of the square, sticking close to cover. Slid along the front of the quartermaster warehouse, weapon still ready. Acutely conscious of the sound her boots made on the grit pathways.
“Definitely not seeing any ground vehicles in the centre. I’d say this place has been deserted for at least a week. Ok, entering the security office now. Door is hanging open – not a good sign.”
She glanced up at the sign over the door. Some joker had replaced the normal words with ‘Town Marshal’. She found herself smiling. Out here on the ragged edge of human colonisation, the rules tended to get bent a little more.
The flipside of that freedom, of course, was that if anything went wrong help was a long way away. And, in her case, getting further every minute. She checked the chrono in the corner of the visor display. Time yet.
“Security!” she shouted, aware of the irony, then kicked the door in and went through fast. If there was anyone holed up in this town, this was one of the places they were likely to be armed.
It was just like the admin building, though. It looked like the ‘Marshal’ and her remaining assistant – or deputy or whatever – had cleared out in a hurry. Sheets of hardcopy scattered in the wind that came through the opened door. The weapons locker was empty and hanging open – a serious breach of regs even if every weapon had been checked out.
“No sign of any note. Security log is locked though, standard override is locked out. There should be a Security Chief and one Specialist on station here.”
There was a scratch at the back of her mind, an itch between her shoulder blades. Something was seriously not right here, but she couldn’t make out what and that was beginning to scare her.
“No sign of weapons fire so far. No bodies, no blood. Raiders would have torched the place, or there would have at least been signs of a fight. Non-humans? No idea.”
She stood on the front porch of the office, holstering the Enforcer, and surveyed the pathetic little town. The scratching sense of dread threatened to rise, but she forced it down. It wasn’t because she had a job to do – if it was only that, she’d be hiding under a desk in the Marshal’s office until the lugger sent a shuttle down. It was the fact that the lugger wouldn’t come back unless she’d amassed enough evidence that the colony really was deserted.
She sighed, kicked at a discarded soda tube. It clattered as it rolled down the steps and then was carried away by the wind. She smiled grimly, despite the situation – whoever had dropped that would be docked pay.
“Guess I’d better sweep the rest of the town.”
The little luminous numbers that squatted in the corner of her vision, letting her know how long it would be before she was without help, ticked down steadily towards a dangerously low level as she explored the settlement. It was the same everywhere she went, poking through the abandoned detritus of other people’s lives. Her searches became cursory after the first few habunits – she could tell just from standing in the doorways that they were empty, devoid of life. Devoid of any comfort.
“About time to head back to the admin building,” she decided, emerging from the last unit, a stack of six family boxes. The sun was high now, high enough to throw light onto the further reaches of the colony, the uninhabited storehouses and machine shops. Her visor tinted to compensate, and in the new brightness she made out the first non-prefab structure. She checked the countdown – she was coming up on the hour and forty check-in time. “Just got time.”
The low building – shack, really – had been put together using a mix of native wood, repurposed transit slabs and hardplas sheeting. One wall was the battered and scored hull of an older-pattern entry pod that had been beaten almost flat.
Just beyond the edge of the settlement, it had the look of someone’s ‘for fun’ project rather than a serious attempt at experimenting with the on-site building that was a necessary follow-on for the colony to become established. “Hello?” she called out when she came up to it. There was an odd, unpleasant smell to the air, and the sense of wrongness coiled tighter in her gut. She paused, bringing the Enforcer up, then pushed on.
The smell should have been enough to warn her, to tell her what she was going to see.
It took a moment for her optics to adapt to the dimness after she booted the flimsy wooden door in half. She took in basic outdoor gear, mountaineering kit, almost consciously not looking at what lay in the middle of the shack.
She spun away, staggering back outside, and lost precious moments throwing up the chalky remnants of the e-bar she’d choked down earlier.
CHAPTER TWO – GRIFTERS’ RULES
“Pad, hook me in to the commsnet,” she said around a mouthful of drool and bile, spitting to clear it.
“Error. Local commsnet inaccessible,” came the neutral synthesised voice in her ear.
“What fucking err...” she began, then realised she didn’t have time to query that.
She took off at a sprint for the admin building, hoping it was just a question of coverage. She couldn’t help but glance every few paces at the count winding down in the corner of her vision.
The pad continued to report a lack of access to the commsnet. “Has to be an error in my kit,” she panted as she stormed up the stairs of the admin building and into the comms room.
The timer was ticking towards the check-in alarm. She would have a few minutes after t
he check in before the lag between her and the lugger became so great her transmission wouldn’t reach it before it made the jump at the two hour mark.
The power was still on, but a red warning flashed on the comms consol’s main display. “System error. Hardware fault detected,” she read. “How the fuck have you crapped it in two and a bit fucking hours!”
She keyed voice command. “Display details of hardware fault.” She waited a heartbeat for more red lettering to swim into existence on the screen.
Main transmitter cabling severed. She grinned. That she could fix, though the system diagram that flashed up indicated the damage was on the roof of the building.
She straightened, looked up at the ceiling. Sure enough, there was an access panel – good old standard template design. She looked back as the display flickered, frowned as she caught a glimpse of further text as it faded. She shook her head – something about prayer. “Guess the folks here got a little backward,” she muttered as she pulled a desk under the hatch. She hopped up onto it but couldn’t quite reach the handle had to upturn a waste bin and stand on that, cursing the genetics that had predisposed her to be a short-arse as the hatch swung open and she scrabbled for purchase on the rim.
The clock was ticking down to zero. “On borrowed time, Cane. Same as always.”
The wind hit her hard as she pulled herself up onto the flat roof of the admin building, almost took her off her feet. She caught a glimpse of something – animal not human from the way it moved – disappearing over the edge of the building, but didn't have time to check it out. “You fucker!” she shouted after it, guessing it was the root of the problem.
Sure enough, it looked like the little bastard had chewed away at some of the exposed cabling. Shoddy InterGlobe workmanship, about standard, but easily fixed.
Her personal kit actually had everything she needed. The personal kit in her pack, which was locked into the charging station. She almost breathed a prayer to one of Mother Analou’s Gods, knew that would just be a waste of time and breathe. Instead, she sprinted to the edge of the building, looking down and assessing the drop. “Probably won’t break anything.”
Breathing hard, trying not to let panic overwhelm her, she dropped down, clinging to the edge of the roof as she extended to her unimpressive full body length, then forced herself to let go.
Army basic training came in handy then, instinct taking over to roll her out of the fall and come up fast, limping slightly where she’d landed a little too hard. The pack was right where she’d left it – the way her day was going she’d half expected it to have gone floatabout – and it didn’t take her long to find the basic electronic repair kit she kept in it.
“Never thought I’d actually be repairing something with this,” she breathed, forcing herself to ignore the pain in her ankle as she ran back upstairs and, barely breaking stride, bounded back onto the roof.
She was ten minutes past check in. She maybe had another five minutes. If she was dealing with an arm of the Commonwealth, she knew a failure to check in would bring the lugger tearing back to the planet. InterGlobe policy prohibited that sort of profligate use of fuel and provisions. Traver would be required to assume it was either all ok or she was already dead. In both cases, his orders would be to proceed to jSpace. Bottom line was everything.
“Pad command. Check for commsnet access every ten seconds. Issue an emergency signal and request for assistance as soon as commsnet is re-established.” Her fingers shook infuriatingly as she worked, using the mini pliers to strip back the damaged insulation so she could inject the optic cable fixer and spray instant seal onto the cable.
“Commnet contact re-established. Mayday being broadcast.”
She sank down onto her haunches, suddenly exhausted. Her ankle throbbed now that the adrenalin had flushed from her system.
The countdown had stopped at zero, the point of no return. If the laws of physics had not been adjusted and Traver had stuck to InterGlobe’s rules, the lugger would have transitioned.
**********
It took Sam an hour to decide that the laws of physics had perhaps not been adjusted, and slightly longer to decide that Traver and the lugger’s crew had also not broken the Corp’s rules. The lack of a reply to her mayday was a bit of a giveaway, but for a while she clung to the hope that the repair hadn’t taken and the lugger was pushing a fraction of lightspeed on its way back, transmitting all the way, just not being heard by her.
“Right. Plan B,” she decided after an hour of sitting in the sun and imagining she was back on the scrapertops of Mumbai, basking in the evening sun. That memory brought back something Saskia had said to her once, at the end of one of those glorious evenings.
“Rule number one. Always have an out, Samrit,” she said to herself, trying to mimic Saskia’s broad New Amsterdam tones. “When you’re on the grift, you gotta have an escape plan.”
A back door, tickets to another continent or off-world, registered in a name not even remotely connected to the scam, a go-bag with the bare essentials for when everything went sideways and the only option was to run. Or even better, when you could see that everything was about to go sideways and your gut screamed at you that it was time to cut your losses.
None of those were an option, but she did at least have a fully functional jSpace comms system. Back in the comms room, with the wind still battering at the upper half of the building, she confirmed that there was still an uplink to the satellite. It was, as expected, code locked, unlockable only by the administrator, the chief medical officer or the security chief. That made sense – jSpace pods were expensive and the colony would only have a few; they couldn’t risk any old colonist firing one off.
Rule number two – inventory. “Always have the right tools for the job, or know how to improvise.” And her ability to improvise was one of the things that had first caught Saskia’s eye.
In this instance, she didn’t need to improvise much. The pad she carried had a bit more muscle than InterGlobe Corp standard, mostly because she’d boosted it from Army Logistics supply when the green machine had given her the boot. She’d carefully disguised it as a civilian model while packing it with all the hacking, cracking, worming and datamining software she could lay hands on, most of it from the shadownet, all of it highly illegal. She established a tooth with the comms systems and set her programmes to cracking the security.
“Probably about two hours,” she decided, having spent some time squinting at the progress holos displayed over the pad, showing her virtual army trying to sneak its way far enough into the enemy defences to crack them open.
Her stomach growled, reminding her of the rules – the Standard Operating Procedures, rather – that had been instilled in her during her short, inglorious military career. “Always make sure you secure stocks of food and water. Secure munitions. Gather intel.” She grinned as she realised how that SOP crossed into the grifter’s book of life advice. “And secure any shit worth nicking.”
Leaving the pad hooked up to the comms system but with an open link established to her earpiece, she resolved herself to a more thorough search of the colony. She had maybe a week’s supply of nutrition blocks in her pack (and a six pack of beer, now one short). She didn’t know what had been landed in the goods pod, and didn’t fancy the hike back out there. Water was the key need though, and even if she had a plentiful supply of nutrition blocks and ration bars, she knew she’d go mad if she only ate that shit.
She pulled one of the ration bars from a thigh pocket and eyed it with distaste. Taste of the Tropics, she read. “My arse.” She thumbed it open and munched it down anyway – at least it didn’t taste as bad as the bile from before.
That thought put her in mind of the wooden shack and what lay in it. She swallowed hard to deflect a heave in her stomach. She knew she’d have to face that eventually. “Not yet, though. Things to do, offices to loot.”
She went back across to the Marshal’s office, telling hersel
f as she skirted the edge of the plaza that it was just her training that had her on edge, not the creeping sensation between her shoulder blades, the feeling she couldn’t shake that someone was watching her. The same sense she’d gotten when she realised a mark had cottoned on or local law had eyes on her.
She stopped at the office door, flipping her helmet visor down and switching it to thermal mode as she swept the town with her gaze. The four-winged birds – little bastarding things – glowed warmer than the ambient. Nothing bigger than that, though.
Sam went through the security building more methodically this time, starting with the cells. They were all open, all empty. That was a mercy – she’d half-feared that she’d find the rotting corpse of some unfortunate who’d been locked in and forgotten when the place was abandoned.
One corpse in a day was enough for her, thanks. Too much, really.
“Either they didn’t go in that much of a hurry or folks here are as law-abiding as the reports claimed.”
Even in one of these test setdowns with hand-picked crews of volunteers, there could be trouble. Even the most stable minds could get a little wobbly out here on the edge, particularly in communities that barely broke a thousand people. The lack of reported crime had raised a few eyebrows during her briefings.
She filled her jumpsuit's pockets as she went. Whoever had gone through this place had definitely taken provisions, but they’d been in too much of a hurry to clean the place out entirely. Few more ration bars and some other useful bits and pieces. The Marshal – or rather the security chief – had kept an office at the back of the building and, as expected, it had both a personal safe and another weapons locker, this one for the more serious firepower that might be called for if the colony came under attack.
