When he was finished, he wrung the towel out carefully over the water reclamation drain, then pulled his spare shirt on. All in all, he thought, way better than dead.
There was a knock on the door, and it slid open a crack. “Mr. Ferguson, are you ready?”
“Yes,” he said. He opened the door the rest of the way. A middle-aged Vahn woman smiled anxiously at him and waved him down the hall.
She led him back to the conference room. The chairs had been pushed back against the walls and fastened, and a table had been brought into the center of the room. An elderly but serviceable display was projecting an annotated 3-D map of Cernee into the air above the table. Now that’s useful, he thought, and stepped in to study it.
Mauda was at the far side of the table. “A Cernee-wide bulletin came through from Central this morning,” she said. “The broken cable punctured a section of Rattletrap before it could be pulled back and secured.”
Fergus winced. “How bad?”
“At least thirty dead. Rockcrapper families, mostly. Right now they’re asking for information or witnesses. There’s rumor of an impending security lockdown while they investigate.”
He rubbed his face. “That might make things harder.”
Mauda slapped something down on the table and flicked it toward him. He picked it up and turned it over, then raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Anderson Anders?” he said.
“I assumed alliteration was your thing,” Mauda said.
It was a Cernee ID chip. “How did you get this?”
“Helpful neighbor,” Mauda said.
Oh, right, he thought. The arms dealer.
“If it comes up, you came here from Crossroads Station and are helping us out as a favor to Mr. Harcourt,” she said. “If we’re lucky, no one will look at either of us. We’ve got a permanent shipping card for the lines, and we’re well known, but there’s no way to disguise the fact that you’re not a woman.” She waved one hand dismissively up his length, stopped at his beard, then shook her head in despair.
“I expect not,” he agreed.
She turned to the display, pointing out virtual objects. “The Wheel Collective’s line connects to the near side of Blackcans. You and Mother Vahn both got on the cable car at the main platform there. With the Mezzanine Rock line now broken, we need to take a different route to Central.”
She pointed to the next line out of Blackcans, and it lit up purple at her touch. “This line goes to Leakytown and then to Mezz Rock. That’s the most direct way now.”
“May I make a suggestion?” he asked. He touched a different sequence of dots, moving the purple line over. “We should go from Blackcans to”—he leaned in to read the labels—“EmptyRock, from there to Bugrot, Bugrot to here, then here, and then from there to Central.”
“That takes us nearly a third of the way around the Halo,” she said. “Why would we do that?”
“Caution,” Fergus said. “If Gilger is out to get you, he’s going to know you’re in disarray now and that none of you know your way around Cernee as well as Mother Vahn. He may see it as an opportunity. His best bet to get at you is the next time you take your crates out. With the Mezzanine Rock line down, he can make a pretty good guess which way you’ll go instead. I’m suggesting we pick a less obvious route.”
“And if he doesn’t intend to attack us after all?”
“Then we’ve wasted a few hours and nothing more.”
Mauda pursed her lips, then nodded once, conceding. “You may be right. We’ll take your route.”
“When do we go?”
Reaching under the table, she pulled out his exosuit and thrust it into his hands. “Right now.”
* * *
—
The lichen crates had been staged on an enclosed platform on a central hub, ready to be hooked up via spiders to the Wheel Collective’s line. The hub itself wasn’t spinning, leaving them all free-floating by the time they’d passed from the last Vahn wheel out onto the platform. Mari was there and suited up to help get them sent off.
“It’s hand spiders most of the way,” Mauda said. “We’ll have to recharge at Bugrot and again at NoMoar. Then we can take a car the last leg into Central. How’s your exosuit?”
Fergus had inspected it at length and been unable to find anywhere the thick, flexible smartfabric had been damaged. “It’s better than new, I think,” he said. “Thank you. Beautiful work.”
She waved a hand, dismissing the compliment, but a smile lingered briefly on her face. It bothered him that he could never tell if he was going to say the right thing or not, but he supposed it didn’t matter except to his pride. This trip, for him, was one way, and he wouldn’t be coming back to the farm to get a second try at figuring these people out. And they probably won’t give me a second thought once I’m gone, either, he thought.
“I’m setting my suit comm to channel one-seven-one,” Mauda said, pulling up her suit hood, her transparent face shield still open and up. “If you see anything, give a shout. Otherwise I’ll see you on Blackcans for the next hop.”
Fergus tucked the ID chip into the wrist of his glove, where he could easily pass it over scanners without unsuiting. He toggled his comm over, pulled his hood up and faceplate down, locked it, and then checked all the seals. His bottles and powerpacks were fully charged. “I’m set,” he said.
The spiders were a quartet of heavy wheels that clipped onto the cable and crawled along it until told not to. A handle with controls along the thumb rest was slung beneath them. He’d used them before, but each settlement had its own version, and Mauda had to show him how to connect them to the line.
“Depressurizing the bay,” Mari announced. “If you’re not ready, too bad.”
He kept one hand on the wall bar, his magboots keeping his feet firmly on the platform as the air was sucked out of the bay into storage tanks. The wide doors opened onto space.
Mauda clipped herself ahead of the lead crate, waved to her kinswoman, then shot out into the inky dark. The crates fell in behind her one by one. When the last few were at the platform’s edge, he moved his spider onto the line behind them and unmagged his boots.
“Whoa!” he exclaimed as the spider yanked him out into space with a sharp jerk. Before he knew it, he was well out and moving, the distant lights of Blackcans ahead. Beyond that was the faint, flickering halo of Cernee itself.
He glanced back in curiosity, having been unconscious during his arrival; twelve giant wheels spun in parallel around a single central axis, glinting in the sun. He could identify the part that was the Vahn farm by the blue and green tint. A small, unspun hab hung off the other end with clusters of vehicles docked around it. The Wheel Collective was bigger than he’d expected, but the idea that almost none of the Vahns had ever left made it seem achingly small.
I love what I do, he thought as he sped along behind the line of crates, but I’m glad I grew up with my feet on the ground and my head in free air. Even if I did run away. Sometimes memories were even more claustrophobic than space.
Mauda must have seen him looking back. “You told Mella you grew up on a farm,” she said to him over the comm. “What did you grow there?”
“Bitterness,” he answered, then realized how glib that sounded and added, “Sorry. My grandparents lost almost everything in the floods on Earth and my family never recovered.”
“That must have been hard,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said.
The line slipped behind the sunshield and into Cernee’s Halo proper. “I can see Blackcans up ahead,” Mauda said. “Ten minutes and we’ll be in. I was here a number of times with Mother, and to Mezzanine Rock, but otherwise it’s new territory.” She sounded anxious.
He finally spotted the hab himself; it was, true to advertisement, three can-shaped habs connected end-to-end and painted matte black everywhere there wasn’t solar col
lectors. “Do you want me to take the lead?”
There was a long pause, then at last, “If you don’t mind.”
“No problem. You’ll have to show me what I need to do with the crates when we get to EmptyRock.”
“It’s easy,” she said.
It took several minutes after Mauda reached their platform at Blackcans for all the crates to get hauled in, and him with them. By the time he landed, Mauda had already fed more than half onto a conveyer tunnel that would take them around to Blackcans’ inner-Halo stations. Once she showed him how to get them lined up and inserted into the cargo chute, he hauled the rest over and pushed them in.
“Rest for a minute,” she said when he’d finished. “The cargo tunnel is slow, and once we’re inside we’ll want to move through quickly.”
He hooked an arm around a wallbar and floated there, catching his breath. The platform was tiny and empty of other people—certainly not the one he’d passed through on his way in from the docks. “You have this all to yourself?” he asked.
“Now we do,” she said. “There used to be another hab between the Wheels and Leakytown named Turndown, but it’s dark now, floating out beyond the halo.”
“What happened?”
“Spore ticks,” she said. “They cut their own line and drifted rather than risk spreading them to the rest of us.”
“Oh,” he said. So very many bad ways to die in space, but that one was more terrible than most.
“They were nice people.” Mauda sighed. “You ready to go?”
“Yes.”
They cycled themselves through the platform’s airlock into Blackcans. Fergus hadn’t had to negotiate the interior when he’d first arrived in Cernee, since the major lines all ran directly into and out of the main platform, and he was immediately grateful for that earlier mercy. The narrow corridors of the public passages were slathered with black paint on every possible millimeter of surface. The only things breaking up the dark monotony of the corridors were the lights, set at varying intervals, heights, and intensities in a cacophony of ill-toned, strobing colors.
“Why would anyone choose to live in this place?” Fergus asked. “It’s so awful it’s giving me a headache.”
“It’s also one of the least crowded habs in Cernee, especially for one with six lines into it,” Mauda said. “Now you know how they keep it that way.”
He was ridiculously happy when they reached the far end of the corridor and the exit, even if that was exactly how the residents wanted him to feel. They win; they can have it all for themselves, he decided.
There were two security officers at the blast doors that led to the main platform. They wore black suits with thick yellow stripes along the legs and arms like walking hazard signs. And maybe they are, Fergus thought. One guard waved a wand half-heartedly in front of them both and then let them through.
“Authority,” Mauda said once they were past. “Don’t often see them out this far.”
Their crates were queued up behind other cargo, and they waited patiently until at last they could grab them from the cargo chute and attach them to the EmptyRock line. Mauda unclipped a small device from her suit and sent it floating over the crates to Fergus. “They’ll follow that,” she said, “so don’t worry about them keeping up or overrunning you, although if you stop suddenly you may get bumped hard.”
“Thanks for the warning,” he said. He attached the crate beacon to the head of the line, then placed his spider in front of it. “Can you manage the rest of the crates by yourself?”
“I can handle it,” she said.
He got a good grip on his spider and thumbed the go button. The spider leapt into motion again, dragging him behind it like some random piece of flotsam caught in its wake. He looked back to see the first of the crates shoot out toward him as if fired from a cannon and resolutely turned to face forward.
It seemed only a short time later that Mauda’s voice came over the comm. “I’m on.”
Goodbye, Blackcans, he thought. “Everything look good back there?”
“Fine. You?”
“So far, so good,” he said.
The cable was quiescent and safe, diminishing steadily into the distance. Unlike the line out to the Wheels, main lines were made of pairs of cables, each monodirectional. The incoming line was just a half dozen meters to their right. They passed a few individuals heading into Blackcans, then a small, gray pod marked with a white circle. People in gray-and-green suits rode spiders both in front and behind it.
“What was that?” he asked Mauda.
“Medical pod from Medusa,” she answered. “It’s on the far side across the Halo, out near Sunshield Seven. There are medics all over Cernee, but if you get yourself seriously hurt, try to do it as near to Medusa as you can.”
EmptyRock was a captured, mined-out asteroid, and aside from a distinct smell of old oil in the air, it was a vast improvement over Blackcans. Unfortunately, it was also so crowded it was hard to move between platforms, even with multiple routes to choose from. “I hate to say it, but I’m starting to see what Blackcans was thinking,” he said.
“Another reason we’re pretty happy out on our farm. This . . . is overwhelming. I don’t know if . . .” Mauda’s voice trailed off.
“This would overwhelm almost anybody,” Fergus said. “Think of it as just another deterrent like Blackcans. You haven’t been here before?”
“No,” Mauda answered. “Mother talked about it, though.”
“Are the habs and rocks like individual towns, or are we in someone’s territory?”
“The smaller habs and rocks are mostly run by consensus,” she said. “A few are either their own little tyrannies or run by gangs. Most of them are loyal to one or another of the ‘big five’ powers but don’t interfere with visitors passing through without good cause; a push in one place is going to make someone unhappy enough to pull somewhere else.”
She pointed to two men standing together by the edge of the corridor, watching the crowd pass by. “Blue stripes. That’s how you know EmptyRock is one of Vinsic’s interests.”
Vinsic was another one of Cernee’s “powers” and one of the oldest. His territory abutted Gilger’s, limiting the latter’s expansion in that part of the Halo.
“How long has Gilger been one of the five?”
“Four or five standards, maybe? When he arrived he was just this slimy enforcer from somewhere else that no one paid much attention to, and then next thing we knew he’s not only running his own show but he’s got an entire operation transplanted from somewhere else to back him up. It would take all the others working together to bring him down, and none of them trust each other enough for that, so he just festers and grows.”
“That’s too bad,” Fergus said. Mauda fell silent, either lost in thought or at the end of what she knew.
A single yellow-striped Authority guard was at the far platform, checking IDs but nothing more. After a lengthy and cramped wait, Fergus and Mauda finally got their crates queued for the line out. Fergus took the lead again.
The next hop was to a large cylinder hab named Bugrot, which Mauda described to him as “an aggressively self-managed independent co-op.” The Halo here was thicker—there were lights all around them from habs and tethered rocks—and twice Fergus was nearly hit by someone zooming past the line on a flystick. He wondered how even the small personal flyers made it through without accumulating hapless riders pasted all over their nose-cones like bugs on a windscreen.
“Bugrot’s just ahead,” he said. “You okay back there?”
“I need to recharge my air soon.”
“Me too.”
“See you inside, then.”
He slowly throttled down his spider on his approach and had the stack of crates down to a safe crawl as he swung through the platform entrance. Unlike Blackcans and EmptyRock, Bugrot was large enou
gh to have an automated cargo system, and once he was off the line the lichen crates began creeping forward again.
Fergus cycled himself through the airlock into Bugrot itself. There were a few people here, enough to make the place seem busy but not so many as to feel crowded. As he turned around to see if there was a recharging station nearby, someone slammed into him from the edge of the platform and knocked him over to the far wall.
A fist crashed into the side of his head, painfully mashing his ear through his exosuit hood, and was coming in for a second blow when he caught it, twisting and sending both himself and his attacker spinning in the zero-grav. People pushed out of their way. Whoever his attacker was, they were much smaller and shorter, and Fergus easily outmatched them in strength if not ferocity. Keeping the captured arm in a lock grip, he grabbed at his assailant’s opaqued face shield with his free hand and pulled it away.
Pitchfork Mari.
“What did you do to my aunt?!” she shouted at him.
“Nothing!” he shouted back. “She’s bringing up the end of the crates.”
“She was in the lead when you left, and you were supposed to go to Leakytown!”
“The plan changed,” he said. “I didn’t know we were expected to consult you.” Taking a chance, he let go of her and floated back, lifting his own mask.
Reaching down, she turned on her magboots and stuck herself to the floor with a clang. “You’re a liar,” she said.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Am not,” he said. “When Mauda gets here in a few minutes, you can see for yourself that nothing’s happened to her. I expect she’ll be happy to see you too, considering how far from home you are for someone who’s supposedly never left the safety of the Wheels.”
“That’s none of your business!”
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