A diversion. Suddenly the sloppiness of the Ringer we chased out into the middle of nowhere wasn’t so peculiar. We did exactly what he wanted. “Makes sense,” I said. “Come to think of it, I noticed my hand-terminal getting a little screwy around the site right after. So Pervenio wants us on Titan for, what, to try and head them off?”
“Yes, immediately. We are to travel to the Ring, locate the smuggled supplies, and apprehend whoever was behind this attack.”
“Sounds simple enough.”
“I have also been instructed to inform you that the successful completion of this task will result in payment equal to that of your reward for eliminating the bomber. This ship is returning us to New London. We will subsequently be provided passage on a passenger liner departing Luna tomorrow and meet with Director Sodervall at Pervenio station orbiting Saturn.”
I leaned back in my chair. “Perfect. I’m getting tired of Earth anyway. Guess I can put aside my plans for Europa for now.”
Zhaff’s eye-lens focused on me like he was trying to figure out what I was talking about. I stifled a grin and closed my eyes. I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on or why only Zhaff had been contacted, but I didn’t much care. It was one more chance. It almost didn’t even matter what the pay was going to be. That was just a bonus that would make up for the fifty thousand credits I’d lost when the Ringer blew his own brains out. Even if I had to work with Zhaff again, and be on the freezing moon of Titan, I wasn’t about to complain.
I’d been there on more than a few occasions in my lifetime so I knew how frosty the locals could be. They went out of their way to make assignments trickier. Unlike immigrants in other colonies—who were mostly recently displaced Earthers with no affinity for the place they’d come to live—the Ringers of Titan weren’t really immigrants at all. Not anymore at least. With gas-harvesting efforts on Saturn continuing to flourish, new immigrants flocked from Earth every year, forcing the Ringers to work for lower pay just to gain employment. The generations of people dating back three centuries who’d grown up there didn’t take kindly to that. The Ring was their home.
For all those reasons I didn’t even think to ask about what the Ringer had stolen. It was irrelevant. Collectors got our hands dirty so our employers didn’t have to, and in doing so we helped preserve the relative peace Sol had enjoyed since the Meteorite struck. That was my job. Concerns about retirement could wait.
—
It was after midnight when we finally arrived back in New London, in time to enjoy the better parts of M-day. Security was still patrolling the streets along the Euro-String rail station en masse, but I had no reason to stay on them with all the festivities moved inside. I invited Zhaff along but, as expected, he declined. Not that I minded. After the day we had, I needed some time away from him before I snapped. Instead, he disappeared to wherever it was Cogents stayed in order to finish his report. I only hoped it wouldn’t reach the directors before I was safely aboard the transport to Titan, on my way to another assignment.
I headed into the first club I saw. It didn’t matter how crowded it was with patrons and security officers at that point. Payment for bringing the Ringer bomber in dead had come through at some point before I arrived. It was half what it would’ve been had I listened to Zhaff and waited to confront him, but it was still enough for me to have no trouble enjoying that night and plenty of others.
I took a seat at the bar and ordered the strongest drink they had. Whatever it was, it felt like it was burning a hole in my belly as it went down. When I ordered a second, I noticed Trevor Cross sitting across from me. His head was sunken, his hat crooked, and he wore a sling on his arm. Seeing him helped me remember that fifty thousand credits was better than nothing. I’d gotten the job done. It wasn’t the right way, or the best way, but it was done.
I tipped my drink toward him and grinned. The booze had my eyelids feeling nice and heavy so I probably added a little more insult to it than I should’ve considering I was the reason for his sling. When he finally noticed me he gritted his teeth, got up, and walked away.
A young woman wearing a tight, shimmering red dress immediately took his spot and must’ve thought my grin was meant for her. She smiled back and moved to sit at the stool next to me. My luck was improving. She had all the curves an Earther woman should have. I wasn’t too drunk to register—after a few minutes of conversation—that she was a working girl, but I didn’t mind. I already had a room rented in the city and I planned on enjoying my last hours on Earth as much as I could.
Pretty girls from Earth used to throw themselves at me when I was young and handsome. They’d ask about what the rest of Sol was like or where I was coming from. I’d tell them stories about my most dangerous assignments, exaggerate a little, and enjoy a wonderful evening before running out on them the next morning. Collectors moved around too much to get attached, and I wasn’t keen on winding up in a clan-family like my parents’.
I bought myself and the woman in red a round of the most expensive liquor in the place. Once my glass was filled I raised it for a toast. “Let’s enjoy the dying whimpers of another M-day passed,” I said.
“Another year,” she replied, her ruby lips lifting into a smile.
I tapped the bottom of her glass with mine. “Another year.”
Chapter 10
Somehow I managed to wake up the next morning just in time to catch the rail to New London Spaceport. After jostling through a healthy gathering of Three Messiah preachers spewing their usual lines about Armageddon, I met Zhaff at our gate. Running had me feeling nauseous. We were led onto a rocket-propelled shuttle bound for the USF station on Luna.
The USF tried to restrict inter-Sol ships with their powerful ion-drives to operating beyond the Earth’s upper atmosphere so they didn’t further irradiate it. This policy allowed the Earth’s moon, or Luna, to thrive as the largest ship-manufacturing plant in the entire solar system. Most sizable transport vessels were constructed there, including Hermes and all the other Ark-Ships that had been sent out into the great unknown through the decades.
Zhaff didn’t say much during the twelve-or-so-hour ascension to Luna, and I was grateful for it. Weightlessness wasn’t helping with my hangover, and neither were the few passengers nearby who were new to space travel and vomiting. I was worried that if I opened my mouth for anything but breathing I was going to join them. So I napped as much as I could, and when I couldn’t I stole glances out the viewport down at Earth, imagining how it might’ve looked when it comprised less brown and blue, and more green.
When we touched down on Luna, her meager force of gravity tugged on me and settled my stomach. We were quickly transferred to a tram bound for one of the station’s larger, inter-Sol hangar bays.
Locals were hard at work in every area we passed. They were halfway toward looking like full-on offworlders, though their pasty skin was concealed by the layer of soot that came from working in the most factory-laden place in Sol. Even the largest asteroid colonies couldn’t compare. Close to two million people lived on the moon at any given time, with shifts of worker-immigrants constantly rotating to and from Earth.
“How’d you sleep?” I asked, finally feeling healthy enough to speak.
“On my back,” Zhaff said.
I was in no mood to offer a response to that. His devotion to logic was starting to seem like sarcasm after enough time with him, even though I knew it wasn’t. I stayed quiet for a few moments, and then said: “So, they find out more about that bomber?”
“Further scans couldn’t locate a match for him in any database on Titan.”
“Well, he didn’t come from nowhere.”
“According to you, he planned to be caught. It is possible whoever he is working with erased every trace of him ahead of time.”
“Altering the recorded DNA of any relatives, deleting the genetic trail…It’d take more than your average hacker to do that.”
“Or direct access to the mainframes,” Zhaff countered. “Th
ere are thousands of inhabitants around Titan working in medical labs, with sixty-seven percent having been born on the Ring.”
“Whatever they did, they made him a ghost,” I said softly. I pictured his colorless face before the gunshot went off. It gave me goosebumps. The Ringer was willing to die for his cause without even needing a name of his own. No credits, no renown.
“Pervenio will let us know if they discover anything further,” Zhaff said as our tram slowed down.
“They won’t find a thing.” It was years of experience speaking, but I didn’t have a single doubt I was right. I’d dealt with plenty of illegitimate offworlders trying not to be found. Hell, I’d fathered one. None of them had the connections to bomb New London just to create a distraction. Whoever the nameless Ringer was working for or with, they were good, and I had a feeling we’d come face-to-face with them sooner rather than later if we kept on our path.
The tram came to a complete halt outside our departure bay, where the tremendous passenger liner scheduled to carry us to Titan was already waiting. The thing was easily half a kilometer long, and taller than most of the buildings down on Earth. The blocky hull was made up of a patchwork of shielded plates that guarded from radiation while crossing open space. When one was too tarnished or developed a breach, they simply tore it off and slapped on a new one, shinier than all the others surrounding it.
At least two hundred other Earther travelers were passing through security to get on. Most of them had large bags packed and wore the hopeful grins of immigrants about to set out on a fantastic new journey. I had no doubt that most of them were either naïve or desperate enough to have seen one of the ads begging them to leave Earth and listened. As I looked around at all their faces, I couldn’t help but pity them. Some of the men and women were attractive enough that I knew they could make a better living working the streets of Old Russia than on the Ring, wretched as that was. There were even children being dragged along by their parents. Future offworlders.
“They couldn’t have chartered us something a little nicer?” I said to Zhaff. Not that I wasn’t used to traveling on large passenger liners, but occasionally Pervenio would set me up on private military ships. It seemed wrong to complain since they fronted all my traveling expenses and the hopeful immigrants in line around us had probably sold everything of value they owned to buy passage to Titan.
“The only other public ships scheduled to depart today are heading to Mars,” Zhaff replied. “The next one set to depart for Titan is not leaving for another two weeks.”
“What about private vessels?” I asked, remembering our current assignment. “One of the ships leaving this place might be hiding the supplies we’re looking for.” Only the richest citizens of Sol could afford their own private vessels to carry them around the solar system on a whim. Those mostly belonged to corporations, like Pervenio, which made Zhaff’s earliest assumption that a rival helped with the bombing seem a little more probable.
“That is likely, though there are none listed as being dispatched to the Ring. Regardless, the USF has issued a decree to increase the inspection of departing ships after the bombing.”
“I doubt they’ll find anything. Somebody is being awfully careful about covering their tracks.”
“Agreed. However, Pervenio has asked for us to wait to rattle the cages of any other organizations until we reach the Ring.”
I wondered where Zhaff may’ve learned a phrase like rattle the cages, and then I sighed. “Politics, of course.”
The decree made sense. Pervenio Corp had a stranglehold on the affairs of the Ring, and if another corporation was involved it would be an easier place to extract information. Beyond the reach of USF security, things went smoother, and there were far fewer repercussions. Corporate politics always made things interesting. In Sol, wars over control were fought in the shadows with checkbooks, with barely a shot ever fired.
It took a few hours before the liner was prepped and every passenger was thoroughly inspected. There was no rushing a passenger liner the way we had the Euro-String rail. Zhaff and I kept our eyes peeled for anything suspicious while we waited, but trying to smuggle via a public vessel seemed bold, even for a group willing to bomb New London. Private transports were much less scrutinized.
“Right this way,” a handsome young attendant greeted us once we eventually were permitted to board. He led us down the liner’s spacious central corridor toward our sleep pods.
“Good thing they’ll put us under for this trip,” I said as I looked around at the many doe-eyed immigrants walking on either side of us. “Don’t think I could take two months with this lot. You ever been on one of these?”
“Not this exact model,” Zhaff replied.
“I meant an inter-Sol vessel this size. Or did Pervenio ship you around privately for your entire life?”
“That information is classified.”
I exhaled in frustration.
“I have been on many vessels of this class, however, throughout my training,” Zhaff elaborated before I could say anything clever. “It is a long opportunity for sleep.” His blank façade didn’t change, but the volume of his voice rose just enough for me to wonder if he was making an attempt at being humorous.
“Not sure if it counts,” I said, smirking.
We were led into the portside passenger hold where attendants pulled out our reserved, shelflike sleep pods. They instructed us to place our belongings into the secure storage units underneath. I had my usual set of effects with me, which wasn’t much. My duster, ID, hand-terminal and belt complete with spotters, pulse-pistol, and a few other gadgets. The tiny duffel I’d packed and brought with me only had a few changes of clothing. Zhaff had even less. We stripped down to boiler suits and stepped up into our respective pods.
I’d spent the majority of my life traveling back and forth across the vacuum, but I could never get used to the induced, dreamless slumbers that came with the trips. I would wake up months later, chunks of my life having fallen away in a flash. It was like time travel except for the part where my body felt the accruing years and I’d wake up with another patch of gray hairs.
Sometimes by the time I arrived at a new destination across Sol, the difficulty of whatever assignment I was working on had escalated. Other times the job had been completed by another company’s collector weeks earlier, and there were no credits to be had. I hoped that wouldn’t be the case for our continued mission, and since whoever was transporting the supplies couldn’t move much faster than a passenger liner, it didn’t seem likely. Heading off a smuggler between planets was never tough since the distance between them was so great. Finding out who was behind their actions was the hard part.
A chilly, gelatinous surface hugged my body as I lay in my pod and gave me a shiver. It quickly formed to every camber of my body so that I would remain comfortable under the ship’s initially high acceleration g-forces. An attendant hooked a few tubes with needles into my veins before a glass shield closed over me.
As I waited for the anesthetic drugs to kick in, I wondered if Zhaff could even dream—and if so, what about. Probably a series of complex mathematical equations to solve for all of eternity. Or maybe a white, empty void. Before I could come up with any more ideas I was completely under…
—
When my eyes next blinked open, the passenger liner was slowing in its approach to Pervenio Station–Saturn. I yawned as the lid of my sleep pod popped open. The trip felt short enough to have been a nap, but I knew around two months had passed.
I pulled myself out with ease since we were still in zero g. That would change once we docked at the constantly rotating station, where my muscles would be even weaker than they usually were, from disuse. At the moment, however, I didn’t mind letting the universe cradle me.
I floated there, gazing through a narrow viewport nearby and out into space. Saturn took up the entire view so I couldn’t see any stars, but I could see the glimmer of the planet’s blade-like belt of rock and ice. P
ervenio station floated right at its heart. The entire thing was built into Pan, a tiny shepherd moon causing a breach in the outermost Ring. Only roughly thirty-five kilometers across, it was a first-choice location for the wealthiest company in all of Sol to establish their headquarters in the Ring. From what I was told Pervenio engineers had utilized tremendous thrusters to instill the tiny moon with the fastest permanent spin any cosmic body had ever been given, at least at the time. It simulates a gravitational pull inside that’s one-third the strength of Earth’s. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s still more than even Titan can offer.
The countless craters dotting the surface were hollowed out, with tunnels crisscrossing the moon as if a great metal parasite had crawled inside and spread its limbs. Docking chutes jutted from the rocky outer surface like crooked fingers. No place in Sol received more ships on a monthly basis. Being located directly on the planet’s Rings made sending out ice haulers and gas harvesters extremely efficient.
The harvesters were especially lucrative. They worked tirelessly to siphon from Saturn’s stormy atmosphere the valuable gases that powered modern fusion cores and interplanetary ion-drives—the cornerstones of the emergent Sol-wide economy. They were what made the Ring so desirable, and were the only reason other jealous corporations set their sights on colonizing the moons of Jupiter. But even the largest of the gas giants in Sol didn’t have those gases in abundance like its ringed cousin. Saturn was a relative gold mine, and while a handful of other corporations had their own smaller stations orbiting Saturn, there was no question that Pervenio ran the Ring.
By the time Zhaff woke up to join me, the liner was entering its hangar on the station. Gravity pulled me back to the floor as it rotated to land on the inside face of the rotating moon’s outer wall. It wasn’t strong, but it didn’t take long for my tired legs to start wobbling beneath my weight. The effects of the long trip even seemed to be impacting Zhaff. He still moved with the rigor of a well-oiled machine, but I observed a slight lurch in his steps. It was comforting, knowing there was something human about him, even if those signs wore off quickly.
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