Lucas frowned. “Your superior officer, I think you mean. Don’t forget that she’s a lieutenant, Private.”
“Ah, right, Sir.”
Unlike Pallas, Ceres was just big enough to be spherical, a minor planet. It was orbited by a large station with multiple docks—easy in, easy out. Lucas wished they could have pulled the Fairfax in, gotten what they needed, and put the inner belt behind them as quickly as possible. But they weren’t so fortunate. The station belonged to the Old Earth Empire, which, though ostensibly observing peace with the Kuiper Colonies in preparation for the Summit, nevertheless was no friend to the Fleet or the Council. The peace was tenuous. Lucas had no intention of testing it by flying a warship into their docks—with or without nukes.
That left Ceres itself. It was a strange world. The surface was an icy wasteland, but a few meters beneath rolled an enormous freshwater ocean. It was there in the dark that humanity had long ago built a new home for themselves—one of many—against all odds.
“Anyone been here before?” Lucas asked. They were all huddled in the cab of the hopper, Caspar at the helm. The cargo bay had been refitted for safe transport of the core.
“I have,” Mulligan said. She scratched an itch on the side of her nose. “Once.”
“Really?” Tompkins guffawed. “Care to tell the tale?”
Mulligan shrugged. “Not much to tell. But I know someone who might know people in the tubes.”
“Someone who might know ‘nuclear core on the black market’ kind of people?” Adams lifted an eyebrow.
“Maybe. On the south side. There, Lieutenant.” She pointed at a blinking white beacon on the surface. “That’ll get us there.”
Caspar looked to Lucas. He shrugged. “Alright,” she said, sounding dubious. She fired back-thrusters to decelerate as the hopper came in to hug the surface. There wasn’t an atmosphere to speak of; the void met the horizon here, bathed in the cold light of the distant sun. Soon they were skimming along a few meters above the solid ice.
Ahead, the beacon continued to blink. revealing a tall, cylindrical tower. The tower grew, until by the time they arrived it was clear it was a port, large enough to swallow ships many times the size of the hopper. They drifted up to the top and were hailed.
“Unidentified maintenance vessel, state your business.” The voice was dry and sardonic. Lucas wondered how many “maintenance vessels” came by on a regular basis. The port in orbit may have been all above board, but it was widely known the tubes of Ceres were a breeding ground for the black market. Pirates and other ne’er-do-wells could always find what they needed here, so long as they were willing to play by the rules of the minor planet’s mafia families.
Lucas nodded to Caspar, who opened the channel. “Ceres surface, this is mining supplier four-nine-seven.” He shrugged as he made up the number. “Requesting permission to enter the tubes.”
“Processing request, four-nine-seven. Please declare any weapons at this time.”
Weapons? For once, that shouldn’t be a problem. The pirates had left them with hardly anything, and the copper wiring had stripped them of most of the rest. They each wore a single pistol. The ship had no weapons capabilities.
“We bring no weapons, Ceres surface.” Lucas pulled his pistol and tucked it beneath his shirt. The others did the same.
“Then you won’t mind being boarded and searched. At gunpoint.” There was a brief silence, during which a few beads of sweat broke out on Adams’ forehead. “Just kidding, four-nine-seven. Keep your side-arms. You’re going to want them down there.”
A puff of air vented out into space as the spiral doors of the giant cylinder opened. Caspar cut the comm.
“I guess they like their comedy about as cold as the surface out here,” she said.
The cylinder housed a tunnel, the end of which was not in sight. Red running lights spanned as far as they could see. Here and there were side-tunnels, with signs painted on the wall, labels like ‘Devil’s Fields,’ ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ ‘The Cooler.’
“Where are we,” muttered Adams, “a prison?”
Other shuttles passed here and there, but Lucas was growing uneasy about one in particular.
“Anybody else notice we seem to have acquired a tail?”
“Hang on,” Casparsaid. She dodged to the right and headed into a tunnel labeled ‘The Soup.’
“This isn’t the way,” Mulligan said.
“Be back on track in a minute.” Casparhugged the right side of the tube and cut the comet-hopper’s floods, then reached up and flipped a switch, bringing down the interior lights as well. For a moment, they hovered in near-perfect darkness. Then, outside, the wall of the tube began emanating a gentle, pulsing glow.
“Ummm…” Tompkins scratched his head.
“Private?” Lucas bent down to look out the window at the flowing phosphorescence. “Is that… I mean, are we… is that the ocean?”
“Yup.” Mulligan gave a half-smile. “Welcome to the first Earth colony: the bacteria clouds of Ceres.”
“How’d they get here?” Tompkins asked.
“I’ll give you two guesses,” Caspar said. “They came with people. Or they came with people.”
Tompkins snorted.
“Heads up,” Lucas muttered. Behind them, the tunnel lit up with the same lighting configuration they had seen on the craft that had dogged them in the main tunnel.
“Coincidence?” Tompkins said.
“No way.” Caspar accelerated, pushing them past the glowing bacteria clouds and further down the dark tunnel. Behind them, the lights matched their pace.
“I don’t know this tube very well,” Mulligan said. She sounded nervous.
“The walls are reinforced, yeah?” Caspar asked. “I mean, we aren’t going to shatter the screening if we bump into it on a turn, right?”
“No… they’ll hold.” The private didn’t sound convinced.
Running lights appeared ahead, revealing a sharp turn to the left. Caspar gritted her teeth and swung out into the middle of the tunnel to give them some room.
“Lieutenant…?” Tompkins had a vice-grip on the back of Caspar’s chair.
“Stow it, Private! I’m driving here.”
They flew into the curve at an alarming speed and shot into the next stretch of straight tubing, letting out a collective breath. Lucas struggled to keep his balance as the hopper corrected and evened out.
“Take us down,” he said.
“What?” Caspar was already pouring more onto the accelerator.
“Do it. Land on the bottom and shut it down.”
She nodded and pulled back. The hopper came to a slow hover, then planted on the bottom of the tube, and fell silent. Not a moment too soon. The lights whipped around the curve from behind and shot up the tunnel. Everyone peered up through the window to watch as the mystery ship flew overhead, seeming to barely clear the top of the hopper. It didn’t slow, but sped down the tube until it disappeared around another bend.
Chapter 7
A few seconds passed. Maybe a minute. No other ships were to be seen.
“That’s good, right?” Tompkins said. “They kept going. Maybe they weren’t looking for us, after all.”
Lucas pursed his lips. He wasn’t so sure. But at the least their ruse seemed to have worked—for now.
“Any idea who might want to follow a maintenance hopper?” He looked at Mulligan. She shrugged.
“You’re in the tubes now, Sir. Who wouldn’t? We’re just as likely hauling drugs or weapons as we are maintenance equipment. If someone runs a scan and doesn’t get one of the family sigs—”
“Can we get one?” Lucas said.
Mulligan scrunched up her face. “I mean, I guess I might be able to write a script that fools most cursory scans… but the real thing is hard to come by. Unless you’re, you know, actually in the mafia.”
“What’s so unique about it?” Caspar asked over her shoulder. She sounded primed for a challenge.
Mull
igan groped the air with her hand, as if a clear explanation would be found there. “They run the Ceres mainframe, you know? They don’t just make the keys. They make the keyholes. If that makes sense.”
“You mean to say,” Tompkins said, “they don’t just buy the bullets—they make the gun?”
“Or maybe,” Casparsaid, “they don’t just dance the dance—they write the songs?”
They both looked at Lucas, eyebrows raised.
“If either of you think I’m going to throw in another ridiculous metaphor, you can go for a long spacewalk without an airtank. Point is, can we put something together good enough to get us by without being chased down a side-tunnel every five minutes?”
“Let’s see.” Caspar juiced up enough power to get the hopper’s comp running. Low lights came on in the cabin, illuminating her hands as she began calling up an e-port into the Ceres network from the console.
“I wouldn’t,” Mulligan said.
Caspar paused mid-swipe and gave her a sidelong gaze.
“I mean, unless you know how to make yourself invisible on a hexashield grid.”
Caspar cursed. Tompkins let out a low whistle. Security on the Fairfax itself wasn’t that tight. Nothing in the colonies had that rating, save the Council archives. Not even top military got to snoop around in there. On a hexashield grid, nothing got in that wasn’t supposed to. And nothing ever got out.
“Let me.” Mulligan stood at Caspar’s side, nodding at the console. Caspar looked to Lucas, who gave another ubiquitous shrug. She sighed and ambled over to the passenger’s side.
“I’m all for encouraging the youth of tomorrow,” she said. “But this seems like a bit—”
“There.” Mulligan flashed a smile. She had made it past the hexashield firewall.
Lucas, Caspar, and Tompkins all stared at the console, eyes bugging.
“Much as I’d love to take credit for being the greatest hacker in the entire system,” Mulligan said, navigating her way to a vehicle directory, “and I might be—don’t rule it out, I mean—that wasn’t a hack. Just a password someone happened to have left lying around.”
“Huh.” Lucas watched as she scrolled down a long list of maintenance sigs. “From your, ah, friend?”
“You could call him that,” Mulligan said.
“Gunner,” Caspar said, “your girlfriend’s got a history. Did you know?”
“She’s not my girlfriend!”
“I’m not his girlfriend!”
Mulligan and Tompkins frowned at each other, then at Caspar. Mulligan bent back to her work.
“These are registered vehicles?” Lucas asked, nodding at the screen.
“Yup.” Mulligan pulled one up and pointed at the sig, a few humble lines of symbols that represented a complex body of code unique to that ship. “See the general construction here? And here?” She pointed out different sections of coding. Lucas spotted patterns, but without more knowledge of the Ceres system, not enough to make a judgment on the viability of producing a convincing counterfeit.
“Can we forge a registration that will pass muster?” Lucas said.
Mulligan was frowning, gazing down and shaking her head.
“Too bad her actual boyfriend can’t just make us legit,” Tompkins said. “Is he a boss, Angie?”
“No,” she said absentmindedly, “he’s not really with the families, but they trust him. It’s complicated. It’s… oh! Of course!” She swiped away the sig and pulled up a new module from beside the directory, then began filling out a form, sticking the tip of her tongue out the side of her mouth.
“Um…” Lucas squinted at the console. “Are you… are you registering us, as-is?”
She shrugged and nodded. “I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before. But so far as Ceres knows, we’re Dar—we’re him, my friend. And he has the clearance to register a ship like this, no problem. See?” She finished the form and submitted. A checkbox appeared. All clear.
“So what happens if your ‘friend’ notices an unidentified ship registered under his name and decides to check it out?”
She squirmed a little. “Well, we’re friends, after all.”
Caspar narrowed her eyes. “You said he isn’t running with the families. What does he do?”
“He’s, ah, well…” Mulligan looked a little paler than usual. She licked her lips. “I guess he’s like, a low-level enforcer? You know. Nothing important. Nothing we need to worry about.”
“Hm.”
“Well,” Lucas said, “what’s done is done. If we’re on the grid, we’d better make use of our time, so we can get out as soon as possible. Maybe no one will notice anything odd happened.”
Caspar snorted, but nodded.
“Now, then,” Lucas said to Mulligan. “Let’s find your contact and get ourselves a core.”
Mulligan smiled and made for the hopper controls.
“Ah, ah!” Caspar shooed her out of the driver’s seat.
—
Mulligan directed them back to the main tube and down for another ten minutes before taking a fork to the left, labeled ‘Rust.’ She explained it led down to the sub-ocean mining operations that accounted for the primary source of legitimate income on Ceres. Asked if the Empire couldn’t just get enough iron from non-ocean-covered objects in the belt, she informed them that iron wasn’t the chief commodity, but that gold, silver, and other precious metals were to be found in abundance here, which explained the Empire going through the trouble of constructing the tubes in the first place. The trouble of having to live in the tubes and mine for resources beneath an alien ocean explained the nonchalance with which they had abandoned its operation to the mafia, letting the lawless live by their own law, so long as the Empire got its product.
“And I thought the Kuiper Colonies were the new frontier,” Tompkins said.
The cab fell silent as they eased deeper down. Eventually they saw light ahead, more than the red running lights they had been passing. As the light grew closer, Lucas saw that the end of the tube was rimmed in exposed stone.
“Are we beneath the ocean?” he asked.
Mulligan nodded. “It’s shallow. Rust is part of the caves underneath.”
They passed through the end of the tunnel and into a large, vaulted cavern, the opposite wall of which was lined with ship docks of varying sizes. Casparpointed to a section of small airlock doors near the top.
“How’s that look?”
“That’ll do,” Mulligan said.
Caspar turned to Lucas. “You sure about this? Once we dock, we’re on their grid for sure.”
“We’re already on it,” Mulligan said. “But we’re legit. No worries, Lieutenant.”
Caspar looked skeptical.
“I don’t think we have much of a choice,” Lucas said. “At this point, it’s either get a new core or abandon the ship and resign ourselves to a life of mining or breaking thumbs for collections. Personally, I’d rather fix the Fairfax and get off this rock. Any objections?” He looked around the cab. A few eyebrows lifted, but no one said a word. “Take us in, Lieutenant.”
Entrance to the dock was automated. A program ran their credentials, asked how long they planned to park, and opened the door for them. Inside it was a garage like any other. Dim and gray—nothing pretty, but perfectly functional. The airlock cycled and they clamored out of the hopper, stretching.
Tompkins and Kwon were picked to stay with the hopper—Adams wouldn’t leave it otherwise, and he wouldn’t agree to bringing on a core he didn’t get a chance to first personally inspect. That left Adams, Caspar, and Lucas as the team, with Mulligan as their guide. They checked their comms and sidearms, then stepped through the door from the dock into the Ceretian city of Rust.
Lucas had seen plenty of habs in his day—he’d grown up in the Colonies, after all—but never had he felt so enveloped by the darkness of space while surrounded by human faces and electric lights. The street before them was a sort of strip, iridescent signs marking clubs, pubs,
and parts stores along the way. On corners, people huddled together in shadows, talking, smoking, sipping from flasks and bottles. Far overhead, distant lamps spread little pools of light on the craggy, cavernous ceiling, but it did little to illuminate the scene below. Rust was a place of perpetual night.
And apparently a city of nightlife. Music blared from the bars. Everyone was noisy in their chatter, heading in to gamble at one of the casinos or to borrow credits from a loan shark. Beneath the glamour and glitter there was a darker Rust still. Fear and worry on the gaunt faces of men watching over their shoulders. Women dancing in windows, no pleasure on their faces. Workers shuffling past with grime-stained skin and oily hair, eyes downcast.
Yep. This was a mafia world.
Lucas walked beside Mulligan, Caspar trailing behind to cover.
“How’d you meet this contact of yours, anyway?” he said.
“Grew up together, Sir.”
“Best to keep informal down here, Mull. No need alerting the entire population of a Colony presence.”
She did a double-take at his address, then nodded.
“He came here after? He’s a Colonial?”
Mulligan slowed, biting her lip. “Not exactly, no.”
Lucas stopped still and looked her in the eye. “Hang on. Are you saying you grew up here? You defected?”
“Angie!” A jocular voice barked from across the street. Lucas turned to see a towering hulk of a man running at them full-tilt. He pushed Mulligan to the side and moved in to take the full brunt of the attack, hoping Caspar already had her hand on her pistol.
“Max!” Mulligan smiled and dove back into the street, embracing the bear of a man. Lucas looked around to see if anyone else had seen him make an ass of himself. Caspar smirked lightly. He blushed and cleared his throat.
“Angie, why didn’t you tell me you were back?” the big man said. “Geez! Does anybody know yet? Half the old gang’s gone, ya know, but I know Smarty’s gonna wanna see ya… and Don, and Jeremy, and Dragon—”
She laughed. “No, no, I’m just stopping by. But Max, it’s so good to see you. How have you been?”
Starship Fairfax: Books 1-3 Omnibus - The Kuiper Chronicles: The Lunar Gambit, The Hidden Prophet, The Neptune Contingency Page 5
