“True, so why make it mine?”
“Not all of us want to spend every minute of our lives on the farm, despite what Mauda says,” she snapped.
He shrugged. “Your aunt is only two or three crates out now. You can discuss it with her directly.”
Actually it was closer to ten; I am a liar, after all, he thought.
Mari glanced out the portal glass. “You can’t tell her I was here,” she said. “And if she’s not at the back of the crates? You won’t live long enough to know what hit you.”
“Great,” he said. “I’ll look forward to it. Since you got here, I assume you can figure out how to get home again?”
“I know my way around,” she said. “I found you.” Slamming down her face shield, she merged into the tail end of a party passing through on the people-mover and vanished.
She did find me, Fergus thought. If she just followed us, I’d like to know how she managed to get ahead. And if she didn’t follow us . . .
There was more to Mari than just a menacing pitchfork, it seemed, though he didn’t expect his association with the Vahns would last long enough for him to untangle it.
As soon as Mauda came through the platform airlock, she opened up her face shield and caught his expression. “What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “We should talk about ways to get you safely home after the meeting.”
“Can’t I just go back the same way?”
“Not if Gilger has people watching in Central,” he said. “If he knows you got past him, he’s going to sit tight on Blackcans waiting for you on the return trip.”
“Blackcans has the only line to the Wheels.”
“That’s why it’s a good place for a trap,” he said. “But we should get your lichen sold before we worry about it.”
“There’s a small cafeteria near one of the other platforms where we can get something hot to drink while we recharge,” she said. “Bugrot’s likely the only decent food we’ll find before Central itself.”
“Sounds good to me,” he said. She grabbed a people-mover handle, and as he reached for his, he saw a familiar suited figure farther down the tunnel, stationary, watching them. Then they turned a corner and Mari was gone.
* * *
—
After Bugrot, they didn’t linger anywhere longer than necessary. None had the scare tactic ambiance of Blackcans, but despite that, none were any more pleasant. It was a relief when they finally caught a cable car from SpudRock toward Central itself.
Mauda fretted, frequently pulling at the safety straps as if they were choking her. “I’ve never ridden in one of these before. I can’t help imagining . . . I mean, how awful to be trapped in one of these seats, unable to do anything to save yourself? It’s just horrid.”
Fergus caught her gaze. “Mauda, I may not understand the slightest thing about your family, and I may know almost nothing about Cernee, but I don’t imagine Mother Vahn was ever trapped by anything. Certainly nothing so petty as a cable car. She was resourceful, sharp, and fast, and she wasn’t afraid, even right up until the very last moments of her life.”
“I just wish I were more like her,” Mauda said.
Fergus stared at her, a virtually identical copy of Mother Vahn. “That’s a joke, right?”
She glared back at him. “We are each the product of our environment, and mine has been sheltered,” she said.
Fergus shrugged. “No one’s life is easy.”
“Yours doesn’t seem so hard.”
He laughed. “Oh, I am a rubbish example! My life is running from one place to another, then running away again, usually just ahead of angry people with guns. My home consists of bags half forgotten in long-term rent-a-lockers in spaceports here and there, scattered across a dozen worlds. Would you give up everything you have—everyone you love—to live my life? I don’t think so.”
“You chose it,” she said.
“I chose to survive and not to drag anyone else down with me,” he corrected. “It’s all I’ve got.”
Mauda said nothing else for the rest of the line, and Fergus was fine with that.
Central was a proper space station with several spinning rings around a massive spindle-hub, wide corridors, and fresh-tasting air. Nothing noticeably rattled or creaked or smelled, and the walls were a crisp white that, after hours in space or pushing through dark, dank habs, hurt Fergus’s eyes.
They rented a storage cube near the line docks on the spindle and shoved the crates into it with what little energy they had remaining. Mauda’s buyer was waiting in the merchant concourse on one of the rings. They floated, then pulled, then trudged their way up a spoke tunnel from the spindle as the spin gravity picked up. Fergus’s muscles felt like stiff jelly. Between their meandering route, crate transfer holdups, queues, and stopping to rest and recharge, it had been nearly seven hours since they’d left the Wheels.
At the entrance to the ring, a large security post blocked their path, checking people in one by one. And out, Fergus noted. That meant they kept data on who passed through.
He’d given Mauda back the shipping pass at the docks, and no fewer than three yellow-striped Authority guards looked at it, then her ID, before letting her through. They stopped him, wanded him, passed his ID around, and just as he was about to ask if there was a problem, let him through as well.
No one asked for bribes.
The market took up a full third of the ring, lined with one booth after another selling just about anything a person might want and some things Fergus was sure no one could possibly need.
There were directory kiosks located at intervals along the wall, and with them they found their buyer’s booth easily enough in one of several long rows of merchants crammed together on a wide concourse. Fergus lingered at the edge of the booth as Mauda and the buyer haggled. Once an agreement was reached, Mauda presented the man with a verified key for the storage cube and a content certificate from the dock registrar. The merchant, who had the stocky build and clothes of a Sfazili groundsider, in turn handed Mauda a credit transfer pad, and they both thumbed it simultaneously to finalize the exchange.
“That’s it?” Fergus asked as Mauda headed back over to him.
“That’s it,” she said. “Now I just need to get home and figure out how to run a farm and a family. Your part is done.”
He held up a hand before she could leave and handed her a small fob. “While you were dealing with the dock registrar, I rented you a flystick,” he said. “Have you ever ridden one?”
“When I was a child.”
“Take it back to the Wheel Collective directly and avoid the lines. Once you’re home, just set it to auto, and it’ll return itself to the rental agency.”
“I can’t afford this!”
“They’re not that expensive, and anyway, I can. Don’t worry about it,” he said.
She reached out and shook his hand. “Thank you. You didn’t have to help us, but you did.”
“It’s a character flaw,” he answered. “I have an overwhelming need to try to make myself useful.”
Mauda nodded. “It’s been interesting knowing you, and I wish you luck with your . . . project. I expect we won’t meet again.”
And with that, she turned and walked away.
After a few moments’ contemplation, he headed back into the merchant concourse. It was time to pick up a few things, find a good place to set himself up, and start working on the Arum Gilger problem.
Chapter 4
Fergus wandered around Central’s extensive merchant concourse for several hours, trying to get a sense of the movement and rhythm of the place and its people. Though not particularly interested in shopping, he did buy a few packs of nonperishable food and a comm code for Radio Cernee, which seemed like more of a gossip and entertainment channel than any sort of real news. He didn’t mind; all i
nformation was good information. The familiar routine of the job was comforting: slip in, look around, get what he came for, get out, and leave no trace. This was how it should have gone from the beginning.
He checked out through station security as Anderson Anders, reserved himself a seat on the cable car back to SpudRock, then slipped that ID chip deep into a faraday pocket in his pack. From that same pocket he extracted another chip—not a Cernee native one, but a Crossroads ID with the name Liam Langston. Mauda had guessed correctly on the alliteration thing, which spoiled the fun of it just a tiny bit.
Instead of boarding the cable car, he went back to the flystick rental kiosk. Flysticks reminded him of an antique Earth toy called a pogo stick but with a large, maneuverable propulsion engine welded to the bottom and a jack so you could connect it directly to your exosuit systems to control it. The first time he ever saw one, he thought it was a joke. Second time he took it for a ride and was terrified. Third time he didn’t give it back for a week.
It had been a while.
So far, only one place in Cernee had seemed like somewhere he could blend in and not hate every moment, someplace not too crowded, not too quiet, not too directly unwelcoming. He took the ’stick and headed back to Bugrot.
Once there, it took him less than an hour to find a room to rent that met his needs: small, out of the main corridors, but with more than one way to and from it. He wondered, as he often did, if he was being too paranoid. But this time he had a better excuse than usual: not too many jobs started with him nearly being blown up and then detained on an improbable clone farm before he’d even gotten his feet on the ground, so to speak.
Bugrot was a stationary hab with no spin gravity. The room’s minimal amenities included a small, padded systems console on a flexible stand, a metered air recharger, and a pullout bathroom with suction features. The room was clean, and the air smelled fresh enough that he only glanced at the O2 panel from force of habit. Various bins, tethers, and stickypads lined one wall for storing belongings. There was also a hammock bag stretched between opposing corners, and after checking the door lock, he pulled himself into it.
He woke up several hours later. Hauling his pack over to the hammock, he unpacked his tool kit into the air around him, checking each item. Nothing was missing, not even the rusty, worn motorcycle key he’d carried with him since he’d lifted off from Earth for the first and only time. Among his things was a small blackbox device he’d had built to spec for him on Tanduou, one of Guratahan Sfazil’s moons and his favorite place to buy things no one should be allowed to have. The maker had given him a long technical name for it, but Fergus called it the confuddler. Unwinding its leads, he carefully removed the back plate from the room console, wired the confuddler in, and flipped it on. Sitting back, he watched as its only light flickered amber for several long minutes before turning a confident green.
He had inserted himself into Bugrot’s console network, burying outgoing data packets in the identities of consoles all over the hab and beyond, sifting out the responses it wanted from the misdirected replies. A few simple queries, and it happily strip-mined the system of all public information it had on Gilger, buried in enough random bit noise that anyone on the lookout for a rise in hits on that name would be unlikely to see it as a direct query from a single source.
The confuddler quietly nulled the masking noise on its end, leaving Fergus a long night’s worth of information to go through for anything he could use.
Gilger had originally come here from Baselle—a human Faither colony—about seven standard years ago, but it was almost as if he’d come out of nowhere. There wasn’t any mention of him in any of the colony records Fergus could get access to, nor a single mention of his family. In a culture as lineage-obsessed as Baselle, that was striking. Either there was an unprecedented omission in the data stream, or someone in Gilger’s family had done something so unacceptable that the family’s entire surname had been stricken from the records. Finding out which would cost more time and cred than Fergus could afford and risk the potentially fatal attention of the Basellan security apparatus. It did bolster his hunch that Gilger had been high society, as someone lower class would have been exiled or executed with a perfunctory but explicit footnote, preserving the shame.
Gilger’s “pestilential den of half-wits” consisted of his second-in-command, Borr Graf, a small but mean crew of Cernee locals—Fergus had known about those before he’d gotten here—and a lot of muscle from a Basellan exile colony named Luceatos that Fergus hadn’t known about. As near as he could tell, the Luceatans had arrived in one massive influx, adding weight to Mauda’s impression that Gilger had seemed to rise in power almost overnight. He certainly hadn’t gotten there selling old aircans and generator parts.
There was no easy way to infiltrate Gilger’s gang. Gilger wasn’t going to believe a red-bearded giant he’d never seen before was one of his own people, and even if Fergus did slip into the Luceatan group without Gilger noticing him, the Luceatans themselves would. Their home outpost was a Faither penitent colony that believed redemption could only come through death for a righteous or glorious cause. They wore their sins—which ran the spectrum from murder of other Faithful down to being too poor to make the weekly tithe—as tattooed glyphs covering their bodies. How they ended up in Gilger’s employ was unclear, although perhaps the leader mattered less than where he led.
At least Gilger’s territory hadn’t changed much from Fergus’s original research. The hub was a rock on the outer edge of the Halo named Gilgerstone. It was set behind three habs, one of which was connected by a long line to Humbug, which in turn connected to Leakytown. Gilger had influence over another half dozen habs, slowly spreading his control in toward the center. On the map, it was an arrow aimed directly at Central itself.
It’s good to be clear about your ambitions, Fergus thought.
His hand found the flystick fob in his pocket, turning it over and over as he let his mind drift, hoping for inspiration. An hour or so later he gave up, wondering if Mauda had made it home safely.
Focus, Fergus, he told himself. Mauda and the rest of her family are no longer any of your concern, and the best thing you can do for them is go about your own business.
Wriggling free of the hammock, he unplugged his bottle from the room’s air recharging unit and left. In Bugrot’s small central concourse, he paid a half cred for a map of Cernee and the latest news download. The top story was the Governor’s upcoming hearing on the Mezzanine Rock cable disaster, which was described as an accident inquiry.
Accident? Really? He closed it with the remainder of the news unread.
He unchecked his flystick from where he’d stowed it at Bugrot’s underside dock, then cycled it and himself out into space. He’d already loaded the map into his suit’s memory, and as soon as the visual overlay came up, he aimed the ’stick for Burnbottle, the outermost of Gilger’s habs.
By the time he passed Mezzanine Rock, he was moving at a good speed. If only I had wind in my hair, he thought, this would be fun.
Leakytown came and went. It was an enormous old service freighter with an agglomeration of shipping cans and other space trash attached to it, bigger than even Bugrot. There was an asteroid out past it, too small to be inhabited, already mined of anything worthwhile, and just far enough from the periphery of the Halo not to have been hooked in yet. He slowed his ’stick, inched closer until he could reach one of the old surface tethers left behind by miners, and pulled himself onto the rock. Snapping the flystick’s anchor cable onto a ring set into the surface, he pulled his way along the tether until he could make out the rough shape of Burnbottle in the distance.
Through his goggle zoom, he studied the surrounding territory. Burnbottle was a medium-sized can with spin, a small crowd of ’sticks and red-gold vehicles hanging off it in every direction. Traffic moved steadily: the ’sticks, bobsled-sized one-mans, and the slightly larger two-ma
ns coming and going on the exact same approach vector. If the travel corridor was consistent, that meant the untraveled spaces were as well.
If Fergus got lucky, he’d never have to go near Burnbottle, but he filed that info anyway.
Behind that can was the rock Gilgerstone, and below that was a small, shining silver blob that when magnified proved to be a medium-sized private starcraft, its jump engine slung below it on a single outsized fin. The blue stripe and silver hull shone in the starlight like a pearl against black velvet.
Venetia’s Sword. Stolen, and now found. “Gotcha,” he said out loud, and grinned.
The ship winked at him.
What the—?! Fergus flinched, nearly losing his grip on the bar. When he recovered, he set his goggles to their highest mag and watched, his whole body tensed, until it happened again. Some dark, fuzzily out-of-focus object had crossed between him and the ship, momentarily obscuring it. It took him a few minutes to find it again because it was smaller than he expected and a lot nearer.
Hell.
Now that he knew what he was looking for, he spotted them all over, circling Gilger’s territory: sentry bobs. Spheres about twenty centimeters in diameter, they were fully automated, always communicating with each other and a central security system. They had sensors for just about everything on the electromagnetic spectrum plus rudimentary logic and processing capabilities that took cunning to circumvent or fool.
The one that had first drifted across Fergus’s field of view was outside the area of Burnbottle, nearly two-thirds of the way to his little abandoned asteroid. He was lucky it hadn’t detected him coming in. He’d gotten past worse, but several of those jobs had nearly gotten him killed, and he’d already had more than his share of near-death experiences on this one already.
He unclipped his ’stick and shoved himself off the rock with one foot, letting himself drift unpowered some distance away from the rock before he fired it up. He kept the rock carefully between himself and Burnbottle, taking a winding route back to Bugrot just in case he’d been seen after all.
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