The Alliance

by Jason Letts

  Lena and Bailor wanted to move on to something else, but Rion insisted they give him a chance to fix the shuttle. The rest of their money went to parts, but the shuttle never budged an inch. Ashamed at the terrible turn of luck and being responsible for blowing everything they had, Rion couldn’t give up working on it, even after Lena and Bailor left after an angry exchange.

  Rion figured the two of them wouldn’t stick together long. They were like oil and water. Bailor was high strung and full of nerves, while Lena’s general outlook on life was full of apathy. It seemed possible that Bailor would’ve come back to find him within a few weeks after parting near Jupiter, not ten years later when they were older and farther apart. What was the point?

  It did get Rion thinking about the Assailing Face again, and some of the things Reznik had said. If she had been out there now and her plans had succeeded, maybe this war wouldn’t have ever started.

  While pounding rivets one day, Rion couldn’t help but say something referencing what was once the most menacing figure in the solar system.

  “Do you think this thing we’re building could stand up to the Assailing Face?” Rion asked.

  A lot of new workers had been transferred in from other Alliance installations. Nobody laughed or played along as he expected them to.

  “I’d say it could,” one of them responded. “Since this is real and those stories were just made up nonsense to give kids something to fantasize about. It got old and people stopped caring.”

  Rion was taken aback at the idea that Reznik Igorovich had been made up. Sure, they’d never set foot inside her ship or seen her in person, but there’d never been any doubt about the truth mixed in with the legends. It had been a long time, and now the legends were hollowing out.

  Rather than press the argument, he went back to the grousing that came naturally to those in their position.

  “Somebody should tell the project manager that having people work without pay leaves a lot to be desired. We’re practically slaves down here,” Rion said.

  “Man, just shut up. It doesn’t do any good to whine about it.”

  The unsympathetic response was more than he could take. It was a good thing no one could see him gritting his teeth inside his space suit.

  “Really though, hasn’t it occurred to anybody that a lot of this stuff is unfair? None of us deserve to be treated this way,” he argued.

  “What are you going to do about it? Nothing,” said his coworker, further riling Rion up.

  “There’s something I could do. It’s not like I have anything to lose,” he said.

  “Keep talking like that and I’ll report you for it. The last thing any of us need is for you to get us all in trouble with shoddy work.”

  The sad thing about the exchange was that Rion wouldn’t ever know which of his coworkers had threatened to report him, unless he happened to identify the voice without their suits on. The line went silent. No one else was willing to come to his defense, and it was likely many of them were against him.

  If this was what the Alliance was like, he knew he wasn’t a part of it. When he made it back to his locker, he sent another message to Bailor.

  “Where are you? We should meet,” he wrote.

  Rion began to get a sense of why Bailor had contacted him in the first place. It wasn’t just to share details about what the Alliance was doing. No, Bailor had had enough and was ready to do something about it himself.

  “Can you meet me at docking bay thirty-seven?”

  The thought of going back to the Mars spaceport was like being doused with a bucket of cold water. He remembered the hunger, the darkness, the looks of disgust from people who saw him as they went by. It would take him almost the entirety of his day off to make it there by transport, meaning that for sure he wouldn’t return in time for his next shift.

  It was all or nothing from right now.

  Rion told Bailor when his next day off would be.

  The days ticked away uneventfully, since Rion decided to keep his head down and his mouth shut. To even get off the Gravilinx station without rousing suspicion, he needed to buy a two-way ticket and explain he wanted to take a ride and do some stargazing. There was so little he wanted from his room that he didn’t even need a bag. The disc he’d had since he was five sat snugly in his pants pocket.

  When he got off the transport at the Mars spaceport, he saw how little the place had changed. He thought the place was dirty and dusty before, but now the paint on the walls and bits of concrete were chipping off.

  He’d tried so hard to forget this place after he’d left, but he had no trouble remembering the way back to his home during homelessness. As he walked, he also considered that it was fitting that a new journey would start here. It reminded him he had nothing to go back to, nothing behind.

  When he reached docking bay thirty-seven, he saw that it had been completely renovated and had a ship in the bay with an owner who was not the person he intended to meet with. Rion continued looking around for the stringy boy with the pointy hair and long, tanned face. When he saw Bailor, the hair was much the same, but he had more meat on his bones. His eyes had a different tenor to them. He’d shed his fear.

  Still burning with shame over what he’d done to drive them apart, Rion wasn’t exactly sure what to expect or how to act. Bailor’s cold, hard glare melted after regarding his old friend.

  “You came,” Bailor said.

  “What choice did I have?” Rion responded. The life he left behind was paltry and barren, but he was full of trepidation about the path they were about to embark on.

  “Why are they doing this?” Bailor asked.

  Rion immediately grasped the subtext. He wondered why the Planetary Alliance had taken on a more muscular and severe disposition. It could’ve been because of the militarization of the Marshall Force, or that could’ve been easy cover for something else. There was no way for them to know from where they stood.

  “That’d be a good thing to figure out,” Rion said, but his feelings of guilt cut in. “Look, I’m sorry about what happened. I wanted it to work so badly that I couldn’t give up on it.”

  “Stop,” Bailor said, holding up a hand. This level assertiveness wasn’t something Rion remembered. It made him wonder. “You’ve had more successes than failures.”

  A spaceport inspector walked right by them, barely glancing over the two young men. There was a time when Rion would’ve been quaking at being this close to them. A lot had happened since.

  “What have you been doing?”

  Bailor cringed and looked away, suggesting to Rion that hard memories were percolating in his mind. His old friend scratched under his chin and spoke through gritted teeth.

  “There were a few times where I didn’t think I’d make it, like I was hanging by a thread. I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. To take care of my hunger, I needed to go where the food was. So I went to Earth to work for the agra-centers in the Midwest. It’s sunny and warm, but let me tell you it makes being orphaned on Mars seem like a warm welcome.

  “All of the producers are hooked into the Planetary Alliance, and their food gets distributed all throughout the solar system, since it’s so easy to grow in abundance there. But the way they ran things was brutal. If you so much as looked at a head of lettuce the wrong way, they’d starve you. Nobody had any qualms about using food as a weapon to enforce total obedience.

  “Then lately there seemed to be a strange sense of urgency on the part of the growers, like something was coming up behind them all the time. I started to snoop around. Between that and playing dumb and helpful I was able to learn a lot. Cutting off shipments on Venus was the tip of the iceberg. I can show you evidence that they’ve been setting fire to whole fields in order to create shortages. It sickened me.”

  Rion looked at him, watching him get lost in the memories as he described them. In some ways it mirrored his experiences with the ship builders. It seemed like there was no way to win.

  “Why wou
ld they want to create shortages?” Rion asked. Bailor pursed his lips.

  “From what I heard, they were afraid of their crops ending up with the Marshall Force, which is stuck using energy-intensive farming facilities for their food. Even then, it seems a little inhumane to destroy so much when there are a lot of people around who need it.”

  Rion knew where this part of the story went. The feeling like something was inherently wrong and everyone else was turning a blind eye to it had torn him up recently. It was what brought him here. It made him contemplate the unthinkable.

  “So you started thinking about crazy things you could do that might make a difference?” Rion asked.

  A sly grin spread across his friend’s face. It gave Rion a tingling feeling inside, like the implement with which to strike back was an idea solidifying in his hands.

  “I thought about Reznik,” he said.

  “Her plans never got carried out,” Rion said.

  “What if someone picked up the mantle and carried it the rest of the way. People haven’t forgotten. We could make them remember. What was that she said? An idea spread at the greatest scale can always have an impact,” Bailor said, getting more and more animated. He was head over heels about the idea, ready to climb in the Assailing Face and take on the Alliance single-handedly. But Rion wasn’t so sure.

  “I didn’t know you were listening when we were talking.”

  “You think I’d miss one word that came out of Reznik Igorovich’s mouth?”

  Rion was forced to agree with that sentiment. It’d been fascinating to be with her, if only for a short time.

  “We could make them remember,” Rion said. “We could also end up dead.”

  He needed to know that Bailor was aware of the risks before jumping in.

  “I know that,” Bailor said, but it wasn’t convincing enough to Rion.

  “It won’t just be the Alliance that’s after us. Don’t forget who finally got Reznik, some rogue pilot trying to imitate her. Wherever we go, anybody could be coming after us.”

  Bailor looked him square in the eyes.

  “Sometimes I think I’ve been dead since I got left here all those years ago. The life I was supposed to have with my family is long gone.”

  That sealed it. Rion nodded and put his hand on his friend’s arm, fully able to sympathize with the feeling that everything was already taken away.

  “Do you think it’s still there?” he asked.

  “It should be.”

  “What about Lena?”

  “What about her?”

  “Do you know where she is?” Rion asked.

  “We stayed together for almost a year, but eventually I think she got tired of me. We were hanging around the cruises near Saturn and not having much luck. She gave me the rest of the charges we’d scraped together and said she was leaving. Not a clue where she went. Shortly after, I started making my way toward Earth.”

  Rion paused to consider what was motivating him to bring her up. She was crazy, but crazy talented too. He couldn’t imagine going back to the Assailing Face without her.

  “Do you think it’s worth looking around Saturn for her, or maybe Neptune where she was from?”

  Bailor cringed.

  “Combing through billions of people to find her sounds impossible. Besides, you know as well as I do that there’s a fair chance she hasn’t lasted this long.”

  Rion sighed, glancing around the tunnels at places where they’d laughed or schemed together.

  “I don’t think she’s dead. At least, I don’t want to believe it. But you are right that we could spend a lifetime trying to find her and still come up empty handed. Where could she have ended up if all she wanted was to be alone?”

  “Even with all of these people it’s a big solar system. She wouldn’t have trouble finding a way to get lost. Believe me, I’d love it if it was the three of us together again like old times, but we can’t wait for her to get started.”

  Rion begrudgingly accepted his point, but in the back of his mind he held out hope that somehow they’d cross paths with her.

  “Let’s get started then. How do we get there?”

  Bailor produced a chip about the size of his thumb.

  “I’ve already bought our tickets to Jupiter. That’ll take us most of the way.”

  Rion took it, feeling like he was seizing something he’d wanted for longer than he’d known.

  They boarded a Licenza carrier and prepared for the trip, knowing their sense of optimism would have to hold out for quite a while to last until they made it to their hiding spot for the Assailing Face. Rion recalled the trip from Mars to Jupiter they made with Reznik. Much of the boredom and dead time vanished from their memories. Now it seemed like a riveting and mysterious journey that they could only faintly grasp when it happened.

  The Licenza would need at least the same amount of time if not more to pass around the sun and cover the distance to the solar system’s largest planet, sometimes referred to as the gas monster by travelers. Rion and Bailor’s seats came with visors for watching movies when they weren’t up and about around the ship’s recreation areas, which would’ve been plenty entertaining if they weren’t sure to be mobbed with other passengers.

  A middle-aged woman wearing thick gloves and a hat like she was out in the dead of winter sat next to them. From all that time in a spaceport and drifting from planet to planet, Rion felt a natural kinship with common travelers and immediately began to size her up. She had the Alliance’s emblem sewn onto her handbag, either because she had a husband serving or more likely was trying to avoid hassles with transit authorities. That was common enough, but what caught Rion’s eye was a small tattoo on the side of her neck depicting the astrological symbol of Mercury.

  Mercurans took a vast amount of pride in their homeland, in part because they felt they dealt with the most drastic temperature swings in the solar system. Rion couldn’t help but wonder what someone from Mercury was doing traveling from Mars to Jupiter. His straightforward inquiry was met with a rueful smile.

  “My son is there,” she responded, seemingly unaware that without more details the common assumption would be that he was an inveterate drunk, a gambling addict, or both. But her fine clothes suggested he was neither unless the apple had fallen really far from the tree, in which case she may have been tempted not to mention him at all.

  “What does he do there?”

  “He works capturing helium from the planet and turning it into its liquid state. It’s his own business he’s starting. The goal is to supply some of the cryogenic outlets that freeze people alive and store them for the future,” she said.

  Bailor raised an eyebrow, and Rion found the answer more intriguing than he figured he’d get.

  “And how’s that working out for him?” Rion asked. The woman pursed her lips.

  “Access to the planet is highly restricted by the Jupiter regent. Unless you’re on a tour, he apparently thinks his planet can be ruined by small mining operations like these.”

  The boys wished her son better fortune in the future, and it made Rion think of another wrinkle in their plans. Getting the Alliance to change its ways was one thing, but the regent families of the different planets were largely autonomous and insulated from any accountability. Unless it was a massive outpouring from citizens demanding the same thing in unison or a very direct appeal that manages to convince them personally, they were likely to get nowhere fast. Combine that with how many regents there were, and making progress across the solar system truly seemed a daunting task.

  Many more similar conversations with strangers took place over the ensuing days until the carrier docked at Jupiter’s sprawling superstation, which had the shape and the intricacies of a colossal spider’s web. Huge tour ships capable of carrying a hundred thousand passengers a piece seemed like nothing more than flies in the web. Still, only about half of the resident population lived here. Millions more were spread out in smaller stations or roaming fleets. Many of t
he moons had colonies. And there was enough traffic that the gas monster gave the impression of being a highly active hive.

  When Rion and Bailor finally exited the carrier, they looked at the volume of charges they had left and the options that would get them out to their final destination. They didn’t have much, barely enough to hire a pilot to take them out to see their secret spot. Buying a toothpick shuttle, also called a flying coffin, would keep their secret but require almost twice as many charges as they had.

  “I guess we don’t have a choice,” Bailor said. “We can find another perfect hiding space.”

  Rion paused, loathe to kick this off with something that felt like failing. Would the pilot really keep his mouth shut after dropping off a pair of kids at a famous ship thought to be lost for a decade? It would ruin their scheme from the start.

  “We can’t let anybody else see that ship,” he said. “How can we raise the rest of the charges needed for our own shuttle?”

  His mind didn’t wait for Bailor to answer. Considering where they were, dropping by some of the gambling halls was an obvious option. Considering who they were, pickpocketing people or sneaking onto ships to steal valuables were two others. A few moments looking around the superstation’s main concourse was enough to give them a sense that the security around here far surpassed anything they knew on Mars.

  “Are you a good gambler?” Bailor asked Rion, but the memory that came to mind was when he’d bet on a used shuttle before. That hadn’t worked out well at all, and he sure hadn’t done much practicing since. A queasy look came to his face.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” he said. “This should be cheaper than hiring a pilot and keep our secret.”

  “You want to get out and walk?” Bailor asked.