Crossways

by Jacey Bedford

  “Wenna was talking about going back to Olyanda to pick up some of the equipment we left behind,” Cara said. “But we forgot one of the biggest resources Ari left us.” They all looked at her blankly. “His mercenaries.”

  “They were trying to kill us just a few days ago.” Wenna rubbed the stump of her arm above the prosthetic.

  “Of course they were. That’s what they were being paid for, but they were cool and professional and tight as a drum. And now they’re kicking their heels on Olyanda and wondering if they’re going to be able to negotiate their way off that rock. Ari only ever employed the best. They have the advantage that they’ve been tied up on Olyanda for long enough that they’ve not been in a position to accept a new contract to kill us.”

  Ben nodded. “Let’s see what they’re made of.”

  Cara realized they were all looking at her. Oh, right, contact the mercs. She steeled herself. The last time she’d had any direct contact with Captain Morton Tengue she’d been his prisoner. She knew he’d lost men in the fracas that followed Ari’s death. She hoped she’d judged him correctly and that he proved to be a man who didn’t hold a grudge.

  How would he react to a suggestion to come work for the Free Company? Only one way to find out. She’d met him face-to-face, she could find him mind-to-mind, though his telepathy rating was moderate, a Psi-4 at best.

  She cleared her mind and let herself concentrate on Tengue as she’d last seen him, a buzz-cut, thick-necked soldier in a dark blue buddysuit with a white flash at the shoulder, his unit’s uniform. She thought about what she knew of him: tough, professional, undemonstrative, impersonal. All good outward traits in a soldier for hire. She wondered what lay underneath that. Surely there was more to Morton Tengue. Ari had hired him, so he must have come with a good reputation. She got the impression that all the mercs had served together for a long time, so loyalty played a part in their makeup. Mercs weren’t generally loyal to a commander who wasn’t loyal to them, so that gave her another aspect of Tengue to fix on.

  She let her mind range out. Though most Telepaths had a limited range, distances meant very little to a Psi-1—that’s why they were so important to the megacorps. Instant communication was often the difference between the success of an enterprise and its abject failure. It wasn’t just what you knew that counted, it was how quickly you knew it. The only limit was the length of time she could keep the communication open. The longer the distance, the shorter the call.

  She felt her implant handshake with Tengue’s.

  *Who?*

  *Cara Carlinni.* She felt him on the verge of clamping down and cutting her out. *I’ve got an offer for you. Can we talk?*

  There was a long pause. *I’m listening.*

  *We’re willing to set the past aside if you are. We’d like to employ you.*

  *Who’s we?*

  *A new outfit. The Free Company. Not affiliated to any megacorps. Working out of Crossways.*

  *Who’s running it?*

  *Ben Benjamin.*

  He was on the point of cutting her off again and she needed to keep his attention and finish this quickly before her energy levels drained.

  *Please. Talk to me.*

  *You and Benjamin took out two of my best men.*

  *And you led us to our execution. Have we got that out of the way? You were doing your job. We were trying to stop you. Our fight was with van Blaiden. Sadly you picked the wrong boss. I made the same mistake myself once. It’s easily done. The bad guys don’t always wear black hats.*

  Ben had said that to her once about his time in the Monitors.

  *You come here in person and we’ll talk. Face-to-face. You and Benjamin.*

  Cara could feel his wariness, but he was giving them a chance.

  *Done.*

  The back of Ben’s neck prickled. Mother Ramona hadn’t exaggerated when she said Red One was not a great neighborhood. Located in Crossways’ maintenance layer, the station’s underbelly, it was a space the wealthier citizens avoided. The roadways were all narrow canyons with exposed conduits for power, coolant, and waste. Crossing them either meant jumping a three-meter-wide tub-way or walking to one of the rickety looking metal gantries to clamber up and over. The third alternative was climbing down to track level and taking your chance between passing tubs.

  Syke loosened his sidearm in its holster. Ben still carried a derri, as did Cara, but he didn’t draw attention to it as they climbed out of the tub.

  Ronan climbed out of the second tub, leaving his guards behind.

  “We should come with you,” Syke said.

  Ben eyed the three teens lounging against the wall. There had been four when they arrived. One had gone to alert others.

  “Three of us are less threatening than eight. Better stay here and make sure we’ve still got transport if we need to get out quickly.”

  “So we’re your getaway drivers.” Syke hrmphed. “Yell if you need us.”

  “We know the routine.” Cara tapped her forehead. “We’ll keep in touch.”

  “Ronan?” Ben asked.

  *Just teens, wary as hell, but not a threat.*

  Ben, Cara, and Ronan breezed past the teens as if they hadn’t a care in the world. Don’t look like a victim. The only way into the neighborhood from this direction was via a narrow walkway down a featureless tunnel, brightly lit. There were no hidden openings, so no place where an ambush might occur, but an attack from either end would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

  The teens behind them didn’t follow them in.

  They emerged into an open space with a ceiling that felt too low.

  Red One was close to the spindle, a wedge-shaped block of workshops, storage areas, and tenements. This central open space was the closest Red One came to having a commercial plaza.

  “I think we hit lunchtime,” Cara said.

  There were maybe sixty individuals gathered in groups. Every single one of the adults was looking toward them as they emerged from the walkway.

  *Surprise. No malice,* Ronan said.

  *Agreed.* Cara nodded.

  The smell of cooking—salty, spicy, savory—fought with the smell of hot grease, or maybe the grease was all part of the cooking. An open stall with a row of steaming cauldrons was doing good business ladling something into folding bowls the customers had clipped to their utility belts. About a third of the people, men and women, wore green coveralls that said they worked for the station’s maintenance crew, low-paid manual workers, but the others were dressed in a variety of inventive styles from the occasional buddysuit to sarongs—on both men and women—or the collarless shirts and straight-legged trousers that were common on-station.

  A few children, from toddlers to teens, clutched their own bowls and stood in line with parents, though a group of five- or six-year-olds played tag through the crowd. A shout snapped out brought them all up sharp. They stared at the strangers, wide-eyed, peeled away from each other and skittered back to their parents.

  Most of the diners took their food to a seating area furnished with packing case chic, crates and boxes either used as they came or reworked. It didn’t look as though these folks let anything go to waste. Upcycling was an art form.

  “Looking for Dido Kennedy,” Ben announced over the heads of a group of diners.

  There was no answer.

  “Dido Kennedy,” he repeated.

  “Who wants her?” A plump woman with her hair shoved untidily under a leather cap stood up. She wore what might once have been a buddysuit, but the trousers were now a separate garment. The sleeves had been ripped out of the top and the remains hung open above a grubby shirt.

  *That’s her,* Ronan said.

  “You’re Kennedy,” Ben said.

  “Might be.” She sniffed. “Depends who wants to know.”

  “Benjamin,” Ben said.

  “
Wolfe,” Ronan said. “Doctor.”

  “Carlinni,” Cara said. “Garrick sent us.”

  Ben glanced around to see if anyone else was interested. They weren’t. In fact, their disinterest was so studied that he guessed they were taking in the whole scene. Ronan didn’t seem worried.

  “Ah, shit! Just about finished this anyway.” She picked up her bowl and slurped down the last of the contents. “You eaten? It’s good today.”

  “What is it?” Cara asked.

  “There’s vat-meat, fifty cents; razorfin, forty-five; or don’t ask. That’s forty, but you get a hunk of bread with it and it’s got real vitamin supplements.”

  “Don’t ask?”

  “Yeah, that’s right, don’t ask. Most of the folks around here grew up on Casey’s don’t ask. It won’t kill ya. Want some?”

  Cara shook her head.

  Kennedy just shrugged. “Suit yourself. You won’t get better value anywhere on-station, specially not once supplies start to dry up.”

  She raised one eyebrow to make that into a question. Word traveled fast. Ben neither confirmed nor denied it.

  “Come on, this way.” She led them to a narrow entrance between a closed door and a station maintenance hatch. “Mind where you put your feet, I ain’t too particular about where I drop stuff down.”

  Ben caught his toe on something that scuttled away with a metallic tinkle.

  “I said be careful. I only just fixed that little feller.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  The dark passageway opened up into an Aladdin’s cave. Shelves and racks overflowed with what some people might call junk. If there was a space, there was something stuffed into it, leaning against it, or hung in front of it.

  “You a real medical doctor?” Kennedy asked Ronan.

  “Yes, real as they come. You need a doctor?”

  “Not me. Never sick.” She patted her chest. “One of my kids, though.” She looked around. “Shanna, come out from under that workbench.”

  A stick-thin child with big round eyes emerged, dark hair hanging in rats’ tails over her face.

  “This one?” Ronan beckoned the girl, squatted down in front of her and asked for her hand. He grasped her wrist and after a few moments said, “Nothing wrong with this one that a few square meals wouldn’t cure. You don’t feed your kids well around here.”

  “As well as we can afford. It’s her brother that’s the problem. Shanna, go ask your mother to send Ez. Tell her we got a real doctor who’s going to take a look at him for free. That’s right, isn’t it, Doc?”

  “Sure.” Ronan glanced at Ben. *You go ahead, I’m still listening in.*

  Ben stared around the room. Tool chests, none of them matching, climbed on top of each other making a bid for the ceiling, and there were three workbenches, one covered with tiny parts in neat rows, another with a tarp thrown over something lumpy, and a third, the one Shanna had been hiding beneath, littered with the detritus of what appeared to be a dozen failed experiments. In one corner was a couch with a throw over it that Ben strongly suspected was where Kennedy slept.

  “Yeah, before you ask, I know where everything is, so no touching.”

  Ben put up both hands in a gesture of surrender. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “Did you make all this?” Cara asked, a slightly glazed expression on her face.

  “Lord love ya, girlie. Course I didn’t.” Kennedy gestured at the shelves. “Folks bring me stuff they can’t use anymore. Sometimes it’s stuff they’ve . . . found . . . in a finding kind of way. I make it work, get a few credits for it, pass the profit back so I get the best tech to play with. I take it apart, see what makes it run, make it run better, do more. Sometimes I get lucky and sell on a new design, then we’re all in the gravy for a while. I’ve been working on jump tech for a few years now. Figured someone would pay a lot for a system that didn’t lose platinum, or a system that could recover the platinum it lost. It’s got to be possible. That other universe out there, foldspace. Somewhere in that big old chunk of nothing there’s a big old chunk of platinum.”

  “Tell us something we don’t know.”

  “I only said that was what I was working on, y’know, in general. I figured that this time I could sell Garrick something different—jump drives small enough to retrofit. You interested?”

  Ben nodded.

  “I know what Garrick thinks of me. I saw it in his eyes. Fat, ugly woman, can’t be too bright or why’s she in Red One? ’Cept he thinks maybe, just maybe there’s something to what I say, so he ties me into his debt with a couple of hundred creds for materials and sends me off to play pretty.”

  A small disturbance in the entrance announced the return of Shanna with a small boy, even skinnier and paler than she was. Ronan knelt on the floor and took charge of both children.

  “And how’s it going?” Ben chose to ignore Ronan.

  “It’s going good. I got this.”

  Kennedy pulled a cover off a block of wires, tubes, and pipes that looked like an explosion in a spaghetti factory.

  “What is it?”

  “That’s only the big old drive that brought half of a clapped-out O’Neill cylinder through the Folds to be tacked on and used as Crossways’ farm.”

  “That was—”

  “Yeah, I know, close on fifty years ago. Don’t touch!” She slapped his hand away.

  “How does something that size punch something as big as an O’Neill cylinder in and out of foldspace?” Cara asked.

  “Ain’t the size of it, it’s the power that it packs and that’s all about the compression ratio in the antimat— Hey, you don’t need to know that. All you need to know is that if I can reverse engineer this thing and squish it down some, you can have jump drives.”

  “Can you?” Ben asked. “Reverse engineer it, I mean? And if you can, how come no one else has tried?”

  “I’m halfway to understanding it.” She settled the cover back into place. “And the reason no one else has tried is because they didn’t believe the thing survived its trip here. The story always fascinated me. Some tomfool Navigator brought an O’Neill cylinder through foldspace, then got sucked into the black when the thing cracked apart. They looked for the drive but they didn’t find it, so they figured it was lost, too. I figured it was more likely buried. You wouldn’t believe how much shit I had to dig through—literally. I found it in a sump under one of the barns.” She patted the cover gently as if her favorite dog was sleeping beneath it. “Course, it’s fifty years old, so there’s a containment problem, but, hey, you wouldn’t want it to be too easy, wouldya?”

  Ben hastily checked the readout on his buddysuit, but background radiation levels were normal.

  “Relax.” Kennedy smiled. “I ain’t going to put anyone in danger. My friends all live here. I got external containment. Should hold it while I work.”

  “So what do you need to move forward with this?” Ben asked.

  “Platinum. Can’t test anything without it. Four rods.”

  *Ronan?* Ben asked.

  *She’s playing you about the platinum. Going to ask for more than she needs, but she’s straight up about the jump drives. She honestly thinks that she can do it. She was right about the boy, too. Got a heart murmur. Routine surgery will cure him completely. Not likely to be something the good folks down here can afford.*

  Ben jerked his head toward the doorway and the people outside. “This area doesn’t strike me as the safest to keep a fortune in platinum.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t shout about it, but, yeah, those folks out there are only ordinary folks. Just as cream rises, so does scum.” She jerked her head toward the ceiling. “The real hardcases are all on the upper levels, fleecing the fancy folks. No point in robbing the piss-poor.” She turned to Ronan. “How’s Ez, Doc?”

  “Needs
a little surgery, nothing serious.”

  “Expensive?”

  *Ah,* Ronan said. *She’s overdoing the platinum to cover the cost of surgery.*

  “Not so much. We can include it in the deal.” He nodded to Ben.

  “Surgery for the boy, five hundred a month, two platinum rods and you give us first refusal on whatever you come up with. Deal?”

  “Deal!” Kennedy’s eyes lit up. “Five hundred in advance?”

  “In advance. Expect a man called Yan Gwenn,” Ben said. “He’ll have what you need. He’s also my best engineer, a Psi-Mech specializing in ships’ systems.” Ben looked at Cara, who confirmed what he suspected with a tiny shake of her head. Dido Kennedy didn’t have an implant.

  “Yeah, whatever. Send whoever you like. Just make sure he’s got my paycheck and the platinum. Shanna, go tell your mother to pack a bag for Ez. He’s going with this nice doctor. Right, Doc?”

  “Right.” Ronan stood up and scooped the boy up as if he weighed nothing. “He’ll be back in four days. Does his mother want to come too?”

  “She might want to come, but she’s got another three little ones to look after,” Dido said. “You could take Shanna, though. Four days of feeding up wouldn’t do her harm.”

  Ronan nodded and the little girl slipped her hand into his free one.

  *It’s my guess her paycheck will be feeding half this sector,* Ronan said. *And it looks like they all need it.*

  Ben couldn’t put it off any longer. With departure imminent, he had to make a courtesy visit to Victor Lorient and see how the settlers were getting on in their temporary quarters. The multipurpose sports arena seated twenty thousand, so the sanitary facilities were sufficient, if basic, and Garrick had organized enough food vendors. Those who’d extended their menu beyond the usual snack foods were doing good business. It was all working on extended credit, though, until the profits from Olyanda kicked in.

  The stadium looked like the refugee camp it had become. Unlike some of the planet-bound grapple arenas, the spectators’ benches only filled the lower half of the sphere and, though steep, were perfectly safe when gravity was on. There were safety straps for when gravity was off for a game. The bottom of the sphere was flattened off for track events and gymnastics. Currently ten thousand settlers were crammed among rows of beds, nothing more than a blanket on the ground for most, air mattresses for the lucky. The psi-techs had made a more private space for themselves on the lower spectator benches, but they looked anything but comfortable.