by Hugo Huesca
“Take him the fuck down,” Mohawk muttered through clenched teeth. Before Clarke could react, he kicked at Clarke’s knee, hard, before collapsing himself in the ground.
Pain jolted up through Clarke’s leg like an explosion, and he could feel his body clenching in agony. At the last instant, he managed to lift the gun away from Androgynous’ face and take his index finger away from the trigger.
Androgynous used that chance to jump at him, snarling like a feral dog, a mono-knife suddenly in his hands like a parlor trick.
Like many times before in his life, Clarke’s training saved his life. Instead of doubling over in pain like his body wanted, he kicked Mohawk into Androgynous path, making them stumble over each other while cursing loudly. The mono-knife probably did more damage to Androgynous himself than to anyone else.
Clarke stumbled his way back into the alley’s entrance, threatening the other three men with the plastic gun. The thing was a cheap knock-off of the gadgets that Metro Security Protocols used, only two bullets per cartridge—but untraceable, and easily built by anyone with access to a 3D printer and the Net.
Two bullets for three men. But who wanted to be the first?
The kids doubted themselves, halted, glanced at each other. Clarke knew the fight was over.
“Just fuck off,” he suggested, trying not to let his voice tremble from the pain of his knee. “Security is on their way already. Hurry and you may yet lose them.”
“This isn’t over,” said Androgynous. His forehead had a long, nasty gash that sprouted blood like a faucet. It had been dumb luck that the knife hadn’t cut all the way to the skull and further.
“Yeah, we’ll be seeing you around, old man,” Mohawk told him, nursing his broken arm. That was some heavy pain resistance right there. Clarke briefly wondered what cocktail of meds the kid was abusing.
The gang disappeared with the practiced ease of ones who have lost many fights and have lived to fight again, leaving Clarke alone, nursing a bruised knee.
When security did arrive, he was long gone.
The Edge’s lifeblood is the oryza. A rare mineral whose existence was first observed three hundred years ago by a lucky probe taking mineral samples from the Mariana Trench at Challenger Deep.
Non-treated oryza is similar to a grain of rice in both shape and size, and the untrained eye may confuse it for salt after close examination. The untrained eye would need immediate medical attention afterward because oryza is radioactive.
It’s also the only known natural generator of anti-hypertritons, particles of antimatter previously observed only in tiny quantities during particle acceleration experiments.
The Alcubierre Drive was the natural follow up to oryza’s discovery. Using the new mineral as a power source, the Alcubierre Drive generates a configurable energy-density ring around a spaceship. The ring contracts the space in front of the ship and expands the space behind it, allowing the ship to travel at an apparent speed much faster than the speed of light.
Humanity’s golden age had arrived. Space’s secrets—and riches—would no longer be hidden by distance and time.
Except that oryza exists only in faint traces across the entire solar system.
Thus, the first extra-solar mining colony project was set in motion. A promising star system was selected, one that had the necessary characteristics for an oryza-rich environment. At brutal expense in both oryza and normal resources, the first expedition was sent to star system Asherah, and a mining colony was set up on the surface of Asherah V, which the inhabitants named Jagal.
It would be the first colony of humanity’s growing extra-solar holds, an expansion of inter-connected star systems that would become known as the Edge. Rich in oryza and natural resources, the Edge sent back convoys which quickly gained Earth its investment many times over.
That ended very quickly once the Edge realized they didn’t need Earth’s support for much, if at all. As it turns out, it’s easy to win an independence war if the former colonies already control ninety nine percent of the resources that allow for big daddy Earth to reach them in the first place.
Thus, the Edge achieved independence, and the Systems Alliance was born. Relationships with Earth were strained for a hundred-and-thirty-six years, until a decade ago, when the dreadnought Mississippi, under the command of Commodore Terry, plopped into existence straight into Asherah System, bypassing in the process the entirety of the Systems Alliance fleet in the neighboring systems. The Mississippi used a new technology, it was said, one capable of creating wormholes using oryza, folds in space-time that made space travel almost instant. This hyperdrive tech was so beyond what the Systems Alliance corporations could achieve that the Mississippi’s appearance took the entire Edge by surprise.
Nevertheless, the in-system defenders scrambled into formation to give battle to the invader.
The Systems Alliance would know the carnage that followed as the Battle of Broken Sky, and it would learn a painful lesson: Don’t fuck with Earth’s fuel.
Since then, the dreadnought had stood watch over Jagal like a zealous God over His flock. The ship had never moved from the planet’s orbit. It had no need. How could the Edge’s forces oppose it, when the ship could level the planet (and the entire ruling class) with a couple barrages from its torpedo tubes?
Officially, the Second War for the Edge Independence had started when the Mississippi had entered Asherah System and ended when it reached Jagal and broke its garrison. Nowadays, its orbit served an enforcing duty, a grim reminder to the entire Edge not to bite the hand of that fed them.
It was under the watchful vigil of the UEF-SD Mississippi that Joseph Clarke returned home that night. Had the Mississippi’s crew been looking down from their sensors, they would’ve been able to see the ambush that waited for him inside his single room flat. Clarke himself, who lacked the near-omniscient sight of the ship, didn’t see them until it was already too late.
The door’s lock had been tampered with. That was what clued Clarke in. The sensor that was supposed to read his wristband’s signal was fried and had frozen on the OPEN option.
Clarke’s hair stood on its end, and it took him a great effort of will not to look around at the corners of the corridor, which would’ve put the invaders on alert.
In a sense, it could be anyone inside his apartment, he reasoned. He wasn’t so delusional as to deny that he was a bit paranoid about IA, and it wouldn’t be the first time in his life he made a mistake like that. Once, he had thought a couple of burglars were IA grunts, and had almost gone to jail while he tried to fight them off.
Anyone could have tampered with his lock. It could be the kids he had just fought off not an hour ago, it could be a thief (not that he had anything worth stealing), it could even be his ex-wife, looking for reconciliation in her batshit insane way.
The thought made him chuckle.
His hand hovered in front of the door for a second before he cursed loudly and pretended to talk to himself:
“Shit, forgot to buy milk.”
He cursed again for good measure and turned around, trying his best to look pissed off and not like running for his life.
They let him get half a block out of the complex before a black shadow materialized behind him and ordered him to stop right there.
“You have a badge?” Clarke asked the fellow, a man in a black suit.
“Yes. Here it is,” the man said, producing a gun out of his jacket. A real one, metal and heavy, with bullets capable of turning Clarke’s torso into an art project.
Clarke’s eyes went wide. Firearms were heavily controlled in Metro City, given the ease with which they could puncture a hole in the city’s dome and compromise the atmosphere of a couple million citizens.
Since the man in front of him had one, he either was IA or he was a big-league criminal. Both options left Clarke with little wiggle room.
But those few options he was bouncing around in his head dissipated when a second man appeared behind Clark
e and held a sonic baton in front of Clarke’s left ear.
Clarke collapsed to the ground like an android out of batteries. He watched, immobile, how the man calmly placed the baton away and grabbed a tiny square of plastic out of the inside of his jacket’s wrist.
Sub-dermal knock-out, Clarke guessed, as the man loomed over him. Clarke didn’t feel the patch’s effects, he simply blacked out.
3
Chapter Three
Delagarza
Oryza may be the blood of the Edge, but water is the oil of any self-respecting star system. Split water into its basic components, oxygen and hydrogen, and you have a great propellant for intra-system spaceships. It’s also useful as life-support, but that’s merely a trifle in a corporation’s balance sheet.
Planet Dione’s surface was covered almost entirely in ice, and it had a sixth of Earth’s gravity. Plentiful water and reduced fuel requirements for orbital entry made Dione quite attractive to investors. Due to this and its positioning in the Edge (far from Jagal and close to the Backwater Systems), its orbital starport—Outlander Station—was one of the richest private enterprises of the Edge.
Outlander’s income came from the thousands of corporate-sponsored freighters that operated among the Backwater Systems colonies in contracts that lasted two years, and who used the starport for refueling, repairs, and occasional brokerage services.
The starport serviced ten thousand ships on an average cycle. If one were to climb Dione’s highest mountain on a clear night, Outlander would appear as a bloated coin of light when compared to the starry sky around it. The static population of the station dwarfed its temporary population by several zeroes.
Managers, technicians, security personnel, engineers, dockers, medical staff, and many more personnel, all with their own families. About forty years ago, the population of the starport had reached critical mass, and the heads of Outlander’s sub-contracted administration had decided it was cheaper to invest in a planet-based colony than to continue expanding the gargantuan life-support necessities of the starport.
A couple generations later, Colony DHS001 had become a city of its own, home to a million people, few of them directly related to Outlander. Alwinter City, as the colony was known, possessed a booming economy, a young and energetic demographic, and crime statistics that would make Victorian-era London hide its head in shame—right in a pile of dead chimney boys.
As it was famously written in the sailors’ Net boards: “Alwinter! Don’t talk to me about Alwinter. You’ll freeze your balls, right before someone cuts them off and sells them back to you. The food’s good, though, all soaked in butter. You can spend a voyage’s pay in food, booze, and whores, just save something for buying your balls back when you leave.”
It took a very specific kind of personality to live in Alwinter, and not only survive, but thrive.
Sam Delagarza had never committed a crime in his life. He was also the kind of man who believed that technically correct worked just as well as absolutely correct.
He exhaled a long, spicy waft of cigarette smoke and watched how the gray trail rose toward the clinical-white dome of the city before curving in the direction of some invisible air recycling unit.
Next to him, his apprentice shivered, despite being covered in several layers of synthetic fur and electric warmers. Delagarza couldn’t help himself, he chuckled at the sight, almost choking with his cigarette.
“What’s so funny?” the young man asked Delagarza, eyes half-closed. Cold made him taciturn.
Delagarza chuckled again, and said, “Told you the reg-suits were worth the price.”
“The fucking brochure said a coat was good enough. That life-support got rid of the cold.”
“Brochures say lots of nice things, that’s how we get a steady supply of fresh meat into Dione. Yeah, the LS are supposed to keep us nice and warm, and they do, when they’re all working as they should. Which is never. It only takes one or two to fail for cold like today’s. I have seen worse, and I’ve only lived here for a couple years.”
He had seen drone collectors lifting men and women frozen solid on the streets, like Christmas statues of very bad taste.
Compared to Cooke, Delagarza was almost naked. He was wearing a reg-suit, a black-coverall made of a smart plastic synth-thread, a couple meters of plumping, a pair of ventilators, and a motor. The reg-suit was a distant cousin of an environmental suit, only thinner. It had a small battery pack and heat-regulator systems spread invisibly all over Delagarza’s body, with a classy hood for his head. The hood was lined with a mirror-like panels that reflected a warm orange light around Delagarza’s head, but forced him (and everyone else) to wear special sunglasses to compensate.
Thanks to generations of engineering, Delagarza only felt a pleasant mid-summer breeze instead of a brutal cold.
The battery presented a constant expense, though, since it had to be replaced weekly.
It was a simple math analysis. Cost of reg-suit plus battery packs, compared to cost of nano-gel injections or hospital bills, was an obvious choice. He had no idea why people—mostly tourists and newcomers—chose to go with other options.
Cooke shivered again, and before Delagarza could make fun of him, he said, “Are you sure this is a good idea? These people are dangerous.”
“Everyone’s dangerous to someone,” Delagarza shrugged. “Even you, Cooke. Lotti and her gangers are dangerous, but not to us. At least, not today.”
After all, it was business. Another simple analysis. The amount of cash Lotti could make by stealing the spare credits that Delagarza and Cooke stored in their wristbands was less than what Lotti could make by hiring them.
Cooke looked unconvinced, glancing nervously at the sparsely populated corridor they were in. The glancing marked him as a newcomer, which was more dangerous in Alwinter than dealing with a ganger like Lotti.
To distract him, Delagarza offered him a cigarette which the apprentice waved away with a distracted gesture. He was looking at a pair of homeless men who were searching the trash in a distant corner of the corridor, looking for either drugs or disposed reg-suit battery packs they could use to get them through the night.
“Thanks, but no thanks. That shit will kill you.”
“Doubt it. Cigarettes here are so synthetic they barely have tobacco on them anymore. Besides, the stim juices will get to us sooner.”
That got Cooke’ attention. Thankfully, because the two men had started to stare back at the apprentice like a pair of hungry wolves. Their gazes shifted half-way to Delagarza—and his own reg-suit—before they caught his stare and they shuffled a bit farther away.
That’s right, Delagarza thought grimly, don’t get any ideas.
“Stims are harmless,” Cooke said. Delagarza had to do a mental double-take to remember the conversation’s thread. “We would die without them.”
“First one’s false, last one’s true,” Delagarza said, taking another long pull of his cigarette. “Unless you can afford to buy brand, of course. Which, if you could, you wouldn’t be here with me in the first place.”
Stims were a requisite in any colony set in a planet with a gravity lower than Earth’s. They were cocktails of muscle-growth hormones, altered testosterone, bone-reinforcement gels, and many other drugs. The more expensive ones—brands—even had nanobots in them, and made sure all internal organs, even blood and bone marrow, worked at their best.
Thanks to stims, Alwinter’s inhabitants didn’t waste away while Dione’s .69g eroded their bones day after day.
Stim juice’s cheaper versions (the ones that most people could afford) also burned your liver to a crisp after two to four decades of use, depending on their quality.
“Ever wonder why there isn’t any old, poor people in Alwinter?” Delagarza said, putting the nail in the coffin of Cooke’ doubts.
The young man winced and subconsciously raised a hand to his forearm, to the spot where the stim catheter was installed.
Delagarza finished his ci
garette.
It wasn’t like he enjoyed messing with Cooke, despite what the apprentice would say about it. The truth was, Delagarza took his mentorship seriously. It wasn’t just teaching the tools of their trade. If he didn’t warn Cooke, didn’t show him what living in a Backwater World was all about, Delagarza would be negligent. He could get his apprentice killed.
And negligence was a crime.
“They are here,” Delagarza told his apprentice after a couple of minutes in silence. He nodded in the direction of a concealed service hatch in the corridor’s gunmetal walls. Four shadows emerged from them, and coalesced into three men and a woman, all wearing maintenance worker coveralls over their company-provided reg-suits, along with hardened helmets, and highly technical tools magnetized to trays strapped to their waists. “Act normal and stay quiet.”
“What do you mean act normal, what’s that supposed to—”
“Yo, Lotti, my regular!” Delagarza called, waving his hand at the woman. He infused his voice with the saccharine over-enthusiasm of modern ganger culture. “Over here, doll, how have you been?”
Lotti looked like a starving wolf, hard edges instead of curves, cheekbones sharp as hunger, eyes that had to be regrown at separate occasions (she had chosen different colors for each, so one was pink and the other electric green, which made her look deranged), a smile peppered with silver molars, a scar that started at her jaw and disappeared down her neck. She claimed to be twenty-five, but Delagarza had it on good measure she was seventeen.
“Spectacular, Sammie, darling,” she said, “You’ looking fine, Pudgy Pops. Life’ treating you good, yes? That your son over there? He looks cute as fuck!” Her tone was so sweet she could’ve starred in her own kids show. The flower stickers on her overalls added to that impression.
Delagarza had seen her stab a man’s eye out with an ice pick one second after calling him “Snuggle Stickypoo.”
“This here is my apprentice, Nick Cooke. I’m teaching him to fend for himself.” Delagarza gestured at Cooke with one hand while touching his hood with the other, the very image of gallantry. He also nodded at the three men that escorted Lotti. They were her age, had their share of scars adorning their faces, and were smiling happily at Delagarza and Cooke. Their hands never left their coverall’s pockets.
