It was a long float back to his room, trying and failing to think up a workable approach. Only suicidal ones or suicidally expensive ones, like bringing in his own team of mercs from outside and blasting Gilger’s entire encampment to shit, came to him, and his mood grew fouler by the minute.
He came around a curve in the corridor and found a black-suited, black-haired, olive-skinned young woman hovering by the entrance to the rent-a-rooms, waiting. He put one hand to his forehead, closed his eyes, and willed away all the immediate responses that leapt to mind. When he could speak politely, he opened his eyes again.
“Mari,” he said. “Did Mauda get home okay?”
“Yeah.”
When nothing more was forthcoming—no explanation of how she’d found him again or why she was here—he grabbed a wallbar and brought himself to a halt. “It’s been a long day,” he said. “Is there something else you need?”
“I want to help.”
“No,” he said without hesitating.
Her green-brown eyes narrowed. “Why not? I know a lot more about Cernee than you could ever hope to. I know my way around, I know people to talk to, I found you again—”
“Yeah,” he said. He’d swung past her to his door but hesitated before keying the lockpad. “Rather convenient, how you keep doing that. The answer is still no. I can find what I need on my own and without putting other people in danger. I don’t want to be responsible for anyone else. Go home, Mari. Help Mauda; she needs you.”
“I’m not just—” she started to retort.
Sirens cut through the air, drowning out the rest of whatever she had been saying. Angry yellow lights strobed the corridor.
Fergus stuck his fingers in his ears to block the brain-piercing noise. “Now what?!” he yelled.
“Flyby alarm!” Mari shouted back. Her eyes were wide. “The Asiig. I . . . Can I come in? I’m sorry. Please?”
Flyby? The Asiig? Were things not complicated enough already without adding in a visit from the deeply scary aliens next door? Whatever else he might have said, her genuinely frightened expression was enough to make him to relent. “Just until it’s over,” he shouted over the din and opened the door.
She floated in ahead of him, touched off the far wall, turned, and hung there. He slid the door shut with a bang. The clamor of the sirens was dampened but still bled through, and he wished desperately that the walls were thicker. Pulling himself out of his exosuit, he clipped it and his pack to the ring beside the door. Then he kicked off, grabbed the hammock, and pulled himself in. Mari remained motionless, her eyes taking in the confuddler wired into the console and the scattered tools before finding their wary way back to him.
“So, what the hell is happening, again?” he asked, once the hammock had stopped spinning.
“It means the Asiig are in the area. They come across the Gap every once in a while. Sometimes they just pass by in the distance, and sometimes they park right outside the Halo for a while and scare the crap out of everybody. I’ve never been through one anywhere other than home in the Wheels. It startled me is all. You know about Radio Cernee yet?”
“I bought a code for it,” he said.
“They’ll give updates if you’re listening. The alerts usually last a few hours, almost never longer than that. When you go out again, you can also set your comm to monitor channel nine-ninety-nine for the alert. It’s a public Boolean broadcast, on or off for ‘they’re here’ or ‘they’re not,’ but it carries throughout the Halo and a fair bit beyond. You don’t want to get caught out while they’re in the neighborhood.”
That much he knew. “Any reason for the visits? Anyone know why? Like, why now?”
“They watch us all the time,” she said. “Either they saw someone they want, or I suppose maybe it’s because of Mother.”
“What?”
“They took her when she was my age. Got caught off the lines.”
“No one ever comes back from them,” he said. “Not alive, anyway. That’s what all the stories say.”
Mari had crossed her arms across her chest, her eyes unfocused. “Not many come back. But the few they let go . . . they’re never the same again. Mother wasn’t. Sometimes she’d tell us she thought they watched her, but I didn’t believe her. Don’t repeat that to anyone. It’d just give Gilger another reason to hate us. I don’t know. It’s none of your business.”
“So everyone keeps telling me,” he said. He pointed. “There’s a wall coffee maker and clean tubes, if you want some.”
“Thanks,” she said. Her hands shook as she coaxed the hot brew out of the machine. Wrapping both hands around the tube, she let out a long, unsteady breath, then looked him in the eye. That hard-edged defiance was creeping back in. “You really think you can steal Gilger’s ship?”
“I do,” he said. Not that he had any idea how yet.
“Why?”
“Because it’s what I do,” he answered. “And I’m really good at it. I go, I see, I think, I take.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you taking it from him?”
“First, because it isn’t his,” Fergus said. “He arrived at the Shipyard at Pluto with impeccable credentials, enough to get the use of Venetia’s Sword on credit for a three-day trial. He took off, and no one ever saw him or the ship again. It took the Shipmakers and me this long to track down who he was. And then they sent me to find him and bring it back.”
“It can’t be cheap, paying you to do this,” she said. “How much is the ship worth?”
“It’s not really a matter of value,” he said, though the truth was that he was being underpaid at his own insistence; the Shipmakers were some of the few people he could call friends, and they wouldn’t let him do the job just at expenses. “For the Shipmakers, these ships are like their children, and they take great care when they sell one to see that it ends up in good hands. And that’s the other reason I’m here: Venetia’s Sword has a class-four simulated intelligence. These things are smart, as close to genuinely sentient as anyone can make them, and it’s not just that Gilger stole it. He would have had to inflict gross damage to its mindsystems to take control of it.”
“It’s just a ship.”
“And we’re just sacks of protein and piss,” Fergus said. “You think you’re the right one to judge what counts as a person and what doesn’t? Because Gilger thinks he can judge, and not only didn’t he find this ship worthy of its own identity and existence, he clearly doesn’t think Mother Vahn or your whole family are worth theirs either.”
Mari stared at him, fury in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said after he was sure his point had sunk in. “That’s what these ships are and what they mean to their builders, and that’s why I’m here.”
“If they cared so much, how come they didn’t check his credentials better?” she snapped. “See that they were fake?”
“Gilger used real credentials. The legitimate owner of them was found floating outside Crossroads Station about a week after Gilger lifted the ship. Or his body was. It was tagged as an accidental decompression until his IDs turned up back in Earth system as part of a criminal act.”
“If it’s a criminal act, why don’t—”
“Police? Earth Alliance? Do you honestly think anyone gives a shit what anyone out here in these wastelands is doing or has done? No one cares about people out here, not when there are already more and bigger crimes than they can deal with going on right within their cozy reach.”
Mari made herself another bulb of coffee, and eventually met his eyes again. “So it’s just you,” she said. “What’s your plan?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Oh, great!” She threw up her free hand, sent herself into a slow sideways tumble. “So what you’re saying is we’ve got nothing, no hope of justice, no hope of even hurting—�
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“I said I’m working on it.” He pointed around the room at the tools, at the confuddler, at her. “Gilger’s got a lot of security, which makes it hard to get to the ship, but there’s got to be a hole. There’s always a hole. I’ll find it.”
“Siren has stopped,” she said.
He blinked. I didn’t even notice, he thought. “Oh.”
“I should get home. They think I’m over at Harcourt’s.”
“Then go home.”
“Are you going to let me help? At least with information?”
He should’ve just said no outright again, but that angry stubbornness reminded him of himself when he was that age. She’s even more like Dru, he thought, and you know how that ended.
But if it was just information and it satisfied her need to help, maybe then she’d go back to the farm and stay safely out of his way? He didn’t need another complication on his hands.
“I don’t know. Ask me again tomorrow,” he said at last.
She let go of the empty coffee bulb, let it hang there in the air, and kicked back across the room to the door. “Count on it,” she said, slid open the door, and pushed out.
He locked the door behind her, rustled a package of dried food out of his pack, then pulled himself back into the hammock. Hanging there, he unwrapped the food bar, smelled it, then let it float away into the room uneaten. Closing his eyes, he willed his mind toward quiet and waited for inspiration.
Chapter 5
One thing about a hammock in zero gravity, Fergus thought, is that you can be restless in 360 degrees. Seeing the same dull beige walls go by over and over began to mirror the repetitive paths of his thoughts, always coming to the same dead ends. Frustrated, he pulled himself free of the hammock and tumbled slowly, pushing off again whenever he got near a wall, trying not to cannonball too hard through the floating field of tools now scattered and drifting throughout the room.
On his fourth pass, a small silver cylinder collided with his foot, and he plucked it from the air, scowling. The ship’s doorkey. He turned it on, shining its coherent light beam at the opposite wall. Twenty-meter range. Right now he didn’t see any way he was going to get close enough to use it. It’s never that easy, he thought. Except that first time.
The motorcycle key floated past.
It still felt like yesterday that he’d rolled his cousin’s Triumph, remnants of faded sapphire-blue paint flaking beneath his unsteady hands, out past the fringes of town, his heart pounding in terror of being caught. Of going home again. Behind a stand of alder, he’d filled its tank with petrol stolen from his uncle’s shed and started it up. If anyone had heard him roaring across the causeway over the Scottish Inland Sea, no one had come after him. At the time, he had felt like a rare bird flying free at last, a wild thing no longer able to be caged. Later, he’d wondered if it wasn’t just that they’d decided an antique motorcycle and some contraband fuel was a fair price to be rid of him.
He’d never stolen anything before then; nothing he’d stolen since had been anywhere near so easy or weighed so heavily on his conscience. And year after year, he kept paying the increasingly exorbitant storage fees for the Triumph, carefully tucked in a tiny, sealed storage unit a few kilometers from the Glasgow Shuttleport.
As with himself, he liked to think of it as abandoned, with options.
He checked the incoming data stream, which had slowed to a trickle as it caught new references to Gilger. Most were about the upcoming public hearing on the cable break and the people expected to be in attendance. Even if Gilger went to the hearing, he wasn’t going to get there on a ship the size of Venetia’s Sword. And other than the hearing, Fergus had no way of knowing where else Gilger might go.
I could use a Vahn as bait to lure him out, he thought. I know which one I’d pick. There was a small but mean-spirited appeal to the idea, even if it was well outside the realm of anything he’d actually do.
He floated over to the coffee dispenser and got it to squirt him out a fresh tube. Then he parked himself cross-legged mid-room with the confuddler in one hand and the console at the other, trying to fill in the details of Gilger’s history—everything he had ever done, everyone he had ever crossed, since the day he’d shown up at Cernee as the new second-in-command of a half-merchant, half-pirate scumlord named Tamassi.
At his height of power, Tamassi had more than half of Cernee’s outer Halo under his thumb, kept in check only by Vinsic and the Governor. It hardly seemed coincidental that just at the time Gilger had decided to go independent, Tamassi’s organization collapsed from within. Enforcers had turned up dead or turned on one another, or, towards the end, fled Tamassi’s household to work for Gilger directly. Tamassi himself, according to reports, had cycled himself out an airlock sans exosuit in what had been formally pronounced a suicide. A notable number of people whose circles intersected Gilger’s ended up dead that way with no charges ever filed.
Though what info Fergus had gathered suggested that Gilger had no friend in Central either, at least not at the top. Security movements over the last year suggested the Governor was not unaware of Gilger’s encroaching arrow.
Gilger’s second-in-command, Graf, appeared just as Gilger’s star started burning bright, but he’d remained always in his boss’s shadow. Backtracking as far as he could, Fergus found the man—his thick neck and arms festooned with Luceatan sin marks—lurking in the background of a newsbit about a work strike on Burnbottle three days before Tamassi’s death. Graf was clearly Gilger’s connection to Luceatos Colony. Gilger was Basellan, and Luceatos was Baselle’s human dump for unwanted criminals and political dissidents; it was supposed to be a one-way trip, a hell to neither be escaped from nor remembered in, not a place to which any Basellan citizen of any class wanted any connection. Though if Gilger himself had fallen into scandal, he should have those same marks that Graf did. There were connections there that Fergus didn’t understand yet.
He’d come here thinking that the big players were the Governor and Authority under his control, Vinsic—a primary mover of ore and black-market goods between Cernee and most of the area rockcrappers—and then Gilger, a distant third.
There were two other people on Cernee’s power stage who hadn’t made it into Fergus’s research, probably because they weren’t actively engaged in the push-pull for territory and influence that the others were. There was Harcourt, the arms dealer who lived in the other part of the Wheels, who conducted most of his business in Crossroads and farther out and seemed content to leave everyone else alone as long as they afforded him the same courtesy. The last was a woman named Ili who held the reins on medical services and controlled a large part of Cernee’s oxygen generation capacity. Everything in Cernee was balanced on the precarious stalemate between those five powers, like a room of smiling dancers with knives up their sleeves waiting for the music to break their way. The rest of the population was strung out around them, trying to eke out its own survival from the many thick bands of rocks and ice that lay between Cernee and the edge of their backwater solar system.
The hearing would almost certainly clarify the power relationships between the five. I should go, Fergus thought. He wanted to see these people interacting in their own domain, get a firsthand sense of who they were, what made them tick, what might make them useful. Then I can just walk up to Gilger, introduce myself, and ask if he minds if I have a peek at his fancy new ship.
And that, he thought wryly, is the best plan I’ve come up with so far. He pulled on his exosuit and decided to go for the zero-G equivalent of a long walk.
The public section of Bugrot was filled with hole-in-the-wall eateries and a market that had none of the magnitude or cleanliness of the one on Central. It maximized the use of the cylindrical structure, with stores and stalls in 360 degrees around the central tube as if it were more hive than hab. Down the centerline of the tube ran a bar with spokes out to the walls to help people
navigate their way through. The air was faintly rank with the smell of people but not overwhelming or stale.
Everyone wore their exosuits, hoods up but face shields open. Whether it was standard practice or increased fear because of what had happened to Rattletrap when the cable hit, Fergus didn’t know. Suits ran the usual short spectrum of monotony from dark gray to black, but he noticed after a while that the people who seemed most at home all had a similar symbol patch at the center of their upper backs: a black circle with a white asterisk-like star in it.
Others had different patches, although people who were together usually had a symbol in common. One person he saw had three. He wondered if it was a way of deanonymizing neighbors when exosuits were so generic and near-identical, of identifying people to their own.
Dallying through the market, he found a small public lounge and settled into a bright red grippy chair with a fresh download of the local news, keeping half an ear on the conversations around him as he skimmed it. A vid setup at the far end of the lounge was projecting a 3-D drama-opera called One Star, Bright and Distant that was entirely produced in Cernee, set in a fictional hab named Proudcan, about a community of poor but honorable rockcrappers threatened by a predatory warlord named Oskin. Confirming Fergus’s earlier guess, the Proudcanners all had the same orange-and-yellow pickhammer city-mark on their suits.
The show was compelling in ways he was at a loss to pinpoint or explain. After a while he discovered his handpad had gone idle and shut down on him and nearly two hours had gone by. Embarrassed that he’d wasted so much of the day watching a fic, he slipped his handpad back into his bag, pushed out of the chair, and headed farther along the central bar.
At a tiny niche-café he bought a bag of hot noodles, wound one arm through the greasy netting lining the walls, and hung there with a handful of other patrons. He was prepared for bland disappointment but instead found an intense, rich flavor he could not begin to pin down. So far, he thought, Bugrot is weird, but a win.
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