Hollow Space Book 1: Venture (Xantoverse)

by T. F. Grant

  “She, Sara, and her comrades are the holders of my note, as I am the holder of theirs.” Miriam was protecting Sara by making it clear that the group owned the Venture. No point in just killing her now. “They will decide what happens to the ship. If they join this Crowner-gang that you”—she pointed at Aleatra—“are trying to establish, then they are no longer owners of the Venture. You cannot serve two masters on Haven.” She held up a finger. “If they all join your petty little gang, then they can cede the Venture to you. Then we can talk about payments. Or you can persuade them to cede the ship to you without having to join you, but I somehow doubt that Sara will oblige.”

  Miriam stopped speaking, and silence fell over the group. Haggard’s jaw had dropped open. Tai didn’t blame him. Miriam had just turned down an easy score, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of credits. Hela, however, gave a twisted grin of sheer delight.

  Miriam stepped closer to Aleatra with a rustle of leather. “I will not hand the stasis pods to you, Crowner. I will not hand the people inside those pods to you, lost president of a broken empire. They are free to make their own choices when they are brought out of stasis, and I will keep that deal. The Cauder Clan will keep that deal.” Her smile disappeared. “Adjudicate, Sweet-Sap-Rising.”

  “The deal stands,” Sweet-Sap-Rising said. “The deal was with the newcomers as a group. Sara is at present leader of that group. The phrasing was clear. Newcomer DeLaney has left that group to join with Newcomer Aleatra; the deal will be annotated in the Book of Trades to recognize this new circumstance.”

  “Why?” Aleatra whispered. “Why?”

  Miriam patted his cheek. “I was born under the Crown, my dear man. I have no wish to go back to such bondage, nor do I intend to allow others to be kept in it without their consent. This is Hollow Space, this is Haven, and this is freedom.”

  Tai whistled tunelessly. “Well, that’s not something you see every day.”

  “No,” Scaroze agreed. “New seeds grow on Haven.”

  Miriam gave Scaroze a disdainful glance. “This is business, kronac. Nothing more. It is hard to be a businesswoman and a serf at the same time.”

  “Of course,” Scaroze whistled. “My mistake.”

  Chitaan approached Tai. “I do hope this will not alter our deal?”

  “Two separate things, Chit, me old son, two separate things.”

  “There is much to learn of the ways of this place.”

  “And lucky you are to have me to guide you.” Tai stretched his neck. “Haggard,” he called.

  “Aye,” Haggard said.

  “My clients need to see the space you are renting to them.”

  “Aye, it’s up on deck fifty-three, nice place, plenty of room. For a good price.”

  “Deck fifty-three.” Tai raised an eyebrow. “So sorry, I misspoke. My clients need to see and approve the space you are renting to them.” He tapped a finger on his lips. “Would this be the same section of deck fifty-three that depressurized a long-cycle ago, killing everybody who couldn’t get to the ’locks?”

  “The seals have been fixed.”

  “The bulkheads failed, not the seals. And it is difficult to replace rotting bulkheads in only forty-eight cycles when you haven’t even ordered the materials yet.”

  “There isn’t any other place big enough for what they need,” Haggard said.

  Tai grinned. “Decks fourteen through sixteen have space available in the same section. The companionways can be closed off and made into private stairwells. That will give my clients all the room they need, and the space on deck sixteen also has an external airlock, which will allow them to park their ship right outside.”

  “That’ll cost more.”

  “That’s why I’m here to deal for them,” Tai said. “Shall we view the property now?”

  ***

  The Markesians declared themselves satisfied with their new quarters, and Tai haggled hard on their behalf to keep the price low. Including the stairwells raised the price, but Tai still managed to keep it below one hundred credits per twelve-cycle per person. A very good deal indeed.

  Aleatra seemed less satisfied with the small space he had been given by the Markesians on deck fourteen, but since he was freeloading on their credits, he couldn’t really complain, though he did try. Tai wondered how long the Crowner fool could keep feeding on the scraps of the Markesian table before the creatures grew tired of his arrogant games.

  Tai shrugged. Not his problem.

  The Markesian crews were unloading the stasis pods when Tai returned to Cipher Six dock with his clients and Haggard in tow. Hela and twelve Cauder enforcers stood guard over the pile of coffin-shaped pods. Tai shuddered. Would he ever have allowed himself to be locked into one of those things? Could he ever place himself so completely at the mercy of other people? He doubted it.

  The price of Hela and the guards would be added to the Venture’s mounting bill, of course. Miriam had not gone soft just because she decided not to shaft Sara. It was more that she enjoyed shafting Aleatra more.

  Aleatra tried again, of course. “We must open these pods now. Release these poor people from their stasis sleep.”

  “Not until Sara returns,” Hela said. “Those are my orders.”

  “But the pods might fail.”

  “Yeah,” Tai said, “they might, but it’s kinda doubtful. They survived transition into Hollow Space. They survived floating around the graveyard for the best part of three-quarters of a cycle. They survived being picked up and dumped on the deck like packing crates. So we’ll take the risk. They get opened when Sara says they get opened and not before.”

  “They are people,” DeLaney shouted. “They’re not numbers on a spreadsheet.”

  Tai held up a hand to stop Hela simply taking the fool’s head right there on the dock. DeLaney’s screaming was starting to get on everybody’s nerves. Even Aleatra looked pissed.

  “That is precisely what they are,” Tai said. “They ain’t people until they can sit up, breathe more or less free air, and make their own stupid frecking deals.”

  Scaroze and a gang of kronac day laborers started picking up the stasis pods.

  “Take them to my lockup,” Tai said. “Set a guard.”

  Scaroze whistled his assent and shifted the stasis pod onto one huge shoulder. He could probably carry two at a time, but no doubt Miriam was paying by the trip. Hela and the enforcers shifted their positions to more effectively guard the dwindling pile of stasis pods on the deck.

  “Now then.” Tai rubbed his hands together and turned to Chitaan. “My payment.”

  “The scuttler is yours.”

  “Outstanding.”

  Margo hurried across to Tai. “Please. Your mother will not listen to me.” A stray wind from Haven’s air circulation blew a strand of her blonde hair across her beautiful face.

  “So?” Tai snarled.

  “She’s taking the Venture to another dock.”

  Tai laughed. “Oh, Mother, what tangled skeins you weave.” He strode across the dock to where Miriam stood beside the signaler. The chyros was blinking out light signals to the tugs nosing the Venture toward the station.

  “Hello, Tairon,” Miriam said.

  “Hello, Mother. Please tell the”—Tai glanced through the signaler’s telescope—“Longstar and the Crawler.” He sucked air over his teeth. “Quite a lot of power for such a small hulk as the Venture.”

  “Yes, they were the only tugs available at such short notice.”

  “No doubt you had to pay premium rates to book them at such notice too?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Miriam gave a what-can-I-do shrug.

  “Of course.” Tai pointed along the dock. “I had to do the same for the ’lock at the end of the dock. It would be a shame to waste it now.”

  “One of the Cauder docks would be so much more secure.”

  “I rather think that Sara would prefer to use a neutral dock, Mother. The Venture is not, after all, Cauder property.”

/>   “Not yet.”

  “Precisely.”

  Miriam sighed. “Oh, very well. But the extra fuel required to alter the course will be added to the bill.”

  “You’ll have to take that up with Sara.”

  “Oh, I will, dear heart, I will.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Sara looked back briefly before she entered the elevator with Kina and Tooize. DeLaney and Aleatra were discussing something, and Margo was talking with Tai. She looked bothered by something, distraught, while Murlowe just stood by and watched impassively.

  A sense of deflation and dread took hold of her. Leaving her crew behind and going into the unknown prickled at her spirit. Usually, this would excite her. It was one of the reasons she trained to navigate a colony ship: she had a sense of adventure, wanted to see new things and experience new places.

  But Haven was a place that scared her. It wasn’t just that it was so alien to her, but it seemed too chaotic, the rules constantly shifting, with double and triple meaning behind every word. The fear of screwing up and landing her and her fellow crew in trouble threatened to paralyze her.

  The doors closed, trapping her inside the metal elevator car.

  “Kronac levels?” the scrawny woman standing by the elevator controls inside an armored enclosure asked.

  “Yeah, Zam,” Kina said. She tilted her head to one side. “How much for confidentiality?”

  Zam glanced at Sara, her sharp eyes calculating. “She’s a newcomer, Ki. Gotta push the price up for that. Fifty.”

  Kina laughed. They haggled rapidly before settling on fifteen credits.

  “I suppose this is going on the bill too,” Sara said, with a bitter tone in her voice that she did not quite recognize.

  “Nah.” Kina grinned. “This is my gift to you. The Operators Guild is the rumormongers of the place. Remember that. You step in an elevator, you have to pay them to keep their traps shut about you.”

  “Hey,” Zam said, “it’s a living.”

  “It is indeed.” Kina shook her head. “Oh, and any deals that Sara makes with you… I’m backing her on them.”

  Zam licked her lips. “Understood.”

  Tooize whistled impatiently, and Zam twisted the control lever. The familiar whine-clunk-whir of grav-plates winding up filled the car.

  “Is this safe in here?” Sara asked. The metal interior displayed a gallery of rust and erosion, black charred discs of plasma discharge, and good old-fashioned bullet holes.

  “I don’t think you would want to take the stairs down twenty-two floors,” Kina said. “Especially with all the business in the contested territories.”

  The elevator car started to descend slowly.

  “What’s being contested, and why?” Sara asked, trying her best to not let the fact she was shaking be too obvious by placing her hands behind her back.

  “Levels minus-eleven to minus-twenty-one are a scoundrel’s wonderland. It’s pretty much anything goes, and every man, woman and beast for themselves. But there’s value there. If you can control that zone, you’ll have access to the drug trade, some of the finest scavenging yards, not to mention vast corridors that lead to the dark levels. The Blackmarks made their move last week, coming down from their stronghold on levels thirty-one to forty to push out the Iron Council, who had up until now been active in the contested zone.”

  “So these are gangs, yes? Fighting over territory? Doesn’t sound like things change much. What’s the dark levels about?”

  “They’re places not officially mapped or recognized. They are levels that no elevator or open stairway reaches. It was Tai who discovered their location as a precocious teen brat. He worked briefly with the Scholars and realized the station was considerably larger than was recorded by the Drifts. He guessed there was space unaccounted for that would make up at least fifty more levels. There are some who have found ways into these spaces… what’s there and why they’re held in such high value is anyone’s guess.”

  “Who even built this place?” Sara asked. “The people from that old dead planet?”

  Tooize made a garbled chirping noise.

  Kina nodded and translated, “He said he doesn’t think it’s dead. The makers of this station, the old ruined one, and probably the gate were called the Xantonians. There’s a million rumors of what happened to them, but as of right now, the Scholars say they are extinct, the planet is a dead husk, and we’re the only ones left.”

  For a brief moment the elevator car stopped.

  “What’s happening?” Sara said, feeling a fresh wave of anxiety, making her cheeks blush.

  “Damn it.” Zam was jiggling the lever. “The mechanics told me they had fixed that.”

  Tooize whistled at her imperiously.

  “I’m trying. Frecking power lines are kinked. Give it a second.”

  Kina and Tooize pressed against Sara. The large kronac whistled something she didn’t understand. Kina leant in, bringing her lips close to Sara’s ear. Her hot breath made Sara’s hair on her neck tingle as Kina said, “He says don’t do anything rash, but prepare your pistol just in case.”

  Turning to face the athletic woman, Sara found herself staring into Kina’s emerald eyes. Her short-cropped, jet-black hair framed an undeniably beautiful face. Kina was smiling at her, despite the threat of danger. She had sharp incisors that made Sara think of her as a human vul.

  Predatory, but not unwelcoming.

  Tooize made a low, keening sound and removed the large shotgun from his chest holster. He held it low with his bottom two arms and stared at the doors.

  Without realizing she had already drawn them, Sara saw Kina raise a pair of pistols.

  “What’s happening?” Sara said.

  Tooize made a sharp, tooting noise.

  “These are the vuls’ levels,” Kina said. “They’re usually not awake at this time of day, but you can’t be too careful around those bastards, especially considering what happened on the Venture. Your name will likely be added to their grudge records.”

  “Oh, that’s just wonderful, like things weren’t bad enough.”

  “Consider it an honor,” Kina said, flashing her another wicked smile and giving her a wink.

  For a full minute, Sara stood there in silence, her palm getting hot and sweaty around the grip of the pistol as she waited for the doors to open and for a pack of vuls to charge them.

  The elevator car jerked, knocking Sara off balance, pushing her closer to Kina.

  “Oh, crap,” Sara said, raising her pistol.

  “Thank freck,” Zam said.

  “It’s okay, we’re moving down, be calm,” Kina said, holstering one of her pistols and placing a hand on Sara’s shoulder, squeezing gently. “See.” She pointed with her pistol to the round, mechanical dial as it clicked over to level five.

  “That’s it,” Zam muttered. “I’m taking this frecking car off the line until those work-shy bastards fix it properly. Stalling at the frecking vul levels. Lazy-arsed idiots.” She turned and shrugged at Sara. “Sorry about that.”

  Sara lowered her gun and breathed out a heavy, nervous breath. “This journey is going to give me a heart attack before we even get to Tooize’s place. Is it always this tense?”

  “You get used to it,” Kina said. “You get to learn which levels are going to cause you problems.”

  Sara looked again at the damage to the car’s interior and imagined just how many times the door must have opened only for the people inside to be insta-blasted. No wonder the Operator’s Guild walled themselves away behind armored steel-glass.

  It seemed an incredibly insecure way of moving about the station.

  “Is there no other way of getting around, one that doesn’t make you the proverbial fish in a barrel?”

  “Fish?” Kina said, screwing up her nose.

  “Huh!” Sara said, “Finally something you don’t know. It’s an old human saying. ‘Easy as shooting fish in a barrel.’ In this instance, we’re the fish.”

  “Ah,
I see. Well, Haven is weird like that. Although in theory, we could get gunned down at any moment, the threat is the same for everyone, so there’s a kind of understanding that you don’t freck with the elevator. The only other choice is to use the various stair systems throughout the levels, but if you think this is dangerous… that way is far worse. There is no such understanding on the stairways.”

  Level three, level two… on it went, so slowly. Sara fidgeted, her temperature rising. Her back itched. Level one. “Where are we?” she said, to break the silence.

  “One to three are the bank and food stores. Safe levels. Protected by Haggard’s lot.”

  Kina gave her the tour guide as they continued on.

  Level zero: “The main farm for the station. It’s level zero because it aligns with the meridian of the sun. Means it gets full-cycle sunlight. Good for the various crops.”

  “Who farms it?”

  “Station-employed grelas, the little doglike things you’ll see all around the station doing various jobs, smaller, lower-class versions of Miriam’s telepath, Reginous Phan.”

  The elevator stopped.

  “What…?” Sara began.

  “Flip-over,” Zam said.

  “What?” Sara glanced at Kina.

  “The gravity here is always orientated on level zero. Like the keel of a ship.”

  Sara nodded her understanding. “So we get to the middle of the station and… flip the elevator car to the new orientation.”

  “Yup, flip-over. Best to hang on to something.”

  Zam adjusted a wheel beside the lever, and the elevator car slowly spun on its axis. For a moment, Sara was hanging from the handrail; then the elevator righted itself and continued down, but only one level, to level minus-one. The elevator stopped.

  Sara raised her pistol and felt a flush of adrenaline.

  Kina placed her hand on Sara’s shoulder. “It’s okay. This is the Scholars’ level. The Great Library of Knowledge. They’ve got minus-one to minus-five. Probably the safest levels in the entire station—unless you happen to piss off a Drift, and then it’s the most dangerous.”

  “And have we pissed off a Drift lately?” Sara asked.