Dubious Heroes: a novel

by Nicholas Blue

As for facilities, Iapetus made Io look like a luxury resort. Everything but the port and landing pads were below ground, much of it only roughly finished. Someone would come along and bore a tunnel through the rock, slap on a couple of pressure doors, and if it held air, they were done. If you wanted light or any other amenity, then you had to supply it yourself.

  Cozi and I quickly decided the less time we had to spend here, the better. We said our goodbyes to the crew of the Ming Shu, although I figured we’d see some of them around, since it wasn’t a very big port. We left the ship, and checked into the only hotel, which was really just a glorified dormitory intended only for visitors passing through. Meals at the communal mess hall were included in the price of the room. Your dining options were limited to there, or not eating, since there weren’t any restaurants at the port. There were a couple of bars, and both had gambling parlors, catering exclusively to the local workers. They didn’t have to worry about tourists, because there weren’t any. People didn’t come to Iapetus unless they absolutely had to.

  There were supposed to be about twenty thousand workers on the little moon, but you’d never know that from walking around. Most of them were scattered hither and yon at small mining camps, whose living conditions I didn’t care to contemplate. It was rumored to be pretty bad.

  What we did see a lot of were Dyna security goons strolling and swaggering, wearing their black jumpsuits and trying to look menacing, which they carried off pretty well.

  Even more menacing were the infrequent UPDF troopers, wearing blood-red coveralls. The Dyna people all carried stun pistols or shock batons; the UP types were armed with actual firearms. There were checkpoints everywhere, and the first one we had to go through took several years off my life. We were both scanned, and waved on through, no alarm bells, nothing. Whatever happened on Io had stayed on Io.

  In fairness to Dyna, there had been problems there, as recently as a decade ago. I remembered seeing the vids of the protesting workers, who claimed they were being treated as slaves. I didn’t doubt that conditions were bad, but no one had to be there, and that still didn’t justify blowing up several mines and commandeering the port. I recall that a standoff between the company and workers ensued, and was only broken when UP Defense Force troopers landed and took control.

  Union leaders were arrested, tried and convicted, and vanished into whatever fate the UP deemed, and UP troops were (naturally) awarded all sorts of medals and commendations, all with much pomp and circumstance. This happened some years after I’d graduated from Armstrong University, and while I’d never been much of an activist, per se, I was at least somewhat skeptical of the official line. I suppose I still was.

  Kyra was still around, ostensibly keeping an eye on us, or at least on me. I wasn’t having any success getting anyone to take us, on the sly, over to Phoebe. In fact, I couldn’t even get anyone to talk to me about it.

  At a loss for what to do next, I cornered her in the mess hall one morning, and told her we needed to get to the TGS graveyard on Phoebe. She pointed out that we were on our own with whatever idiotic scheme we were up to, and I pointed out that the last time we tried setting something up, it hadn’t worked out so well. And Iapetus was one helluva lot less friendlier than Io had been. She finally relented, and after admonishing Cozi and me to go to our room and sit tight or else, she vanished.

  So, Cozi and I sat in the tiny dormitory room, crammed in with our duffels, a crate of liquor, and two spacesuits. Getting our stuff through customs had been surprisingly easy. An inspector showed up when we landed, and put official-looking orange stickers on everything, then left. No questions, no inspections. I didn’t see money change hands, but I have no doubt that it did. So, we’d put on our shades, mostly to blend in, as most other spacers were wearing them, and dragged all our crap through the port to the hotel. While our identity had been checked at half a dozen checkpoints, I still paid cash for the room. As far as I knew, I didn’t have a personal credit chip anymore. Cozi still had his, but I figured there was no point in pushing our luck.

  Kyra returned to the hotel after just a few hours. She’d changed back into her sleek black outfit. Dressed as such, she didn’t just stand out, she was a walking advertisement. Maybe that was the whole point of it. When she wanted, she could put her hair up, wear a pair of baggy coveralls, and effectively vanish into the crowd.

  She walked in, set her bag on the table, and settled into the only chair in the room. Cozi and I sat on our tiny cots. We were both still dragging ass, even in the eighth of gee gravity of Iapetus. The trip out had drained us both, but it didn’t seem to have effected Kyra at all. I suspected her enhancements had something to do with it.

  “You’re set to go”, she said, without preamble, “And you owe me ten grand.”

  “Ouch”, I said. “That’s quite a bit more than I thought it would cost us. Phoebe isn’t that far away.”

  “That covers your flight, plus a few other things”, she said. “I have a pretty good idea why you’re going to Phoebe, so I had Alfie, who’ll be your pilot, pick up some provisions for you. He should have the stuff aboard his ship by the time you get there. If you don’t need it, just shove it out of an airlock.”

  “Will you be going with us?” Cozi asked.

  “I will not”, she said. “I’ve informed my employer that I have other plans.”

  “And you can’t tell me who that is?” I asked.

  “Nope”, she said, then was quiet for a moment. “Look, you guys aren’t stupid, but you are naïve as fuck. I’m not working for TGS, and I never have. But I find the fact that you went in to them, blackmailed them, and then went on your merry way… well, that’s both naïve and stupid. There’s a lot going on out here you don’t know about, and it’s a lot bigger than you can imagine. If you keep your head down, your eyes open, and your mouth shut, you might live long enough to figure it out. Otherwise, sooner or later, you’re going to sufficiently annoy someone, and they’re gonna squash you like a bug.”

  “Why can’t you just tell us?” Cozi asked.

  “You wouldn’t really believe me if I did”, she said. “You figure it out for yourselves, you’ll not only believe it, you’ll have a much healthier respect for the situation.”

  “I don’t suppose I could hire you”, I said. “We could use the help. Besides, you never finished my weapons training.” A hint of a smile briefly crossed her face, with a touch of what looked like sadness in her eyes.

  “Two problems with that”, she said. “First, I already have another gig. Second, you guys couldn’t afford me.” She rose, and opened her bag on the table.” Well, I’m expected somewhere else shortly. I suppose this is goodbye, gentlemen.”

  I got off the bed and walked the five steps over to her.

  “This should cover what we owe you”, I said, as I handed her two cash chips. “That’s ten grand for the trip and supplies, plus another two thousand for your trouble.”

  She took the chips, and slid them into a pocket. Reaching into her bag, she removed two pistols, and handed them to me. I checked them, as she’d taught me to. Both were loaded.

  “Those fire seven-millimeter caseless, explosive-tipped rounds”, she said. “Aim it at what you want to shoot, and pull the trigger. Each pistol holds forty rounds. They will blow a nice hole in whatever you shoot, including the hull of a ship, so be careful. Explosive decompression is not something you want to learn about the hard way.”

  I put the pistols on the bed, and stuck out my hand.

  “Thanks”, I said. “We still owe you.”

  Cozi got up, and shook her hand, too.

  “I was expecting this to be a pain-in-the-ass, and sometimes it was, but it was also sort of fun”, she said, “And it’s been a long time since I did anything I’d call fun. You guys watch your asses out there.”

  “How do we get those out of here?” I asked, indicating the pistols.

  “Stick em in your bag and carry them out”, she said, looking at me like I was the slow ki
d in class. “Be at Dock Three, Bay Eight, in two hours. Bring anything you intend to leave with; Alfie should be ready to go by then. Her Pod beeped, and she fished it out of her bag. She detached and put the remote ear bud into her ear.

  “Yes?” she said, and was silent for a moment. “I’ll ask them.”

  “Captain Seo is having, um… AI problems.” She eyed me suspiciously. “Would you two know anything about that?”

  “Beats me”, I said, shrugging. “How about you, Cozi?”

  “I didn’t screw with it”, he said.

  “Ask him if he’s tried rebooting”, I said.

  “He can hear you”, she said. “He says he’s tried that, and it didn’t work.”

  “Tell him to do a full shutdown, and restart from scratch”, I said, trying to sound sincerely helpful.

  “He’d like you to stop by, if you have a minute.” Kyra said.

  “We’ll be happy to, but it’ll be a couple of hours.” I said.

  “He says he’ll be expecting you”, she said, as she touched her Pod and disconnected. Shouldering her bag, she headed for the door.

  “You guys be careful out there”, she said. “See you around.”

  And she was gone. I’d neglected to tell her that I loved her, and would go anywhere or do anything she wanted, just to be with her.

  Then again, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea, after all.

  We left the hotel an hour later, lugging our bags, the crate of Bliss, and our spacesuits along with us. It took twenty minutes to find the right dock and bay.

  “Aren’t we stopping by to see Captain Seo?” Cozi asked.

  “Cozi”, I said, “We will be avoiding Seo like the plague. In fact, it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we threw our crap on the ship and got the fuck out of here, pronto”,

  “I knew you were up to something on the Ming Shu“, Cozi said. “What did you do?”

  “No comment”, I said, and began loading our stuff onto the elevator that would carry us up to the gangway, and onto Alfie’s ship. “You coming?”

  “Asshole”, Cozi muttered, as he got aboard the lift.

  As ships go, Alfie’s was pretty unimpressive. It was classed as a shuttle, but was really nothing so much as an overgrown lander. He’d named her the Irie Girl, which I took to be some sort of ethnic reference, which was appropriate, since Alfie himself was fully immersed in some form of ethnicity; real or assumed. He was a short black man, painfully thin, with a huge head of hair, styled in long, tangled braids. I don’t believe he’d showered anytime in the last century, as both he and his ship reeked. Phoebe wasn’t exactly next door, so we’d have to endure the stench for the better part of twelve hours.

  Alfie helped us load our gear into the single cargo hold. There, we also found a dozen crates of dehydrated, concentrated ship’s rations, and even a container of medical supplies. It hadn’t occurred to me that the ship on Phoebe might be stripped of its supplies. Whatever we did or didn’t find, at least we wouldn’t starve.

  The trip out was uneventful, spent belted into an acceleration couch as the Irie Girl blasted at two and a half gees toward the distant little rock that was Phoebe. To describe the trip as uncomfortable doesn’t do justice to the word. Alfie, strapped into his pilot’s couch, kept smoking something in a pipe. I imagined it was marijuana, but never having seen (or smelled) it before, I wasn’t sure. Smoking anything anywhere people have to buy their own air is generally frowned upon. Whatever it was, it gave me a headache. Cozi was looking a bit green, too.

  If Alfie wasn’t smoking, then he was talking or singing. In fact, for the entire twelve hour trip, I don’t think he ever shut up. After a while, I just tuned him out. Cozi had put in his ear buds, and was listening to music via his Pod.

  We reached Phoebe on schedule, and Alfie put us into a low, tight orbit around it. We wouldn’t be able to land until we had clearance from the AI running the place. Any unauthorized attempt at landing would result in us getting our engines shot out by the gamma beam batteries scattered around the moon. TGS owned all of Phoebe; we’d purchased it decades earlier from the United Planets, mostly because no one else wanted it. Physically, it was a five-hundred mile diameter chunk of rock, barely in orbit around Saturn, at a distance of eight million miles. Its eccentric orbit suggesting it was probably less of a moon than an oversized asteroid, captured by the gravity of the big planet. While it had mineral content, there were thousands of similar ones more conveniently located. Its remoteness did, however, make it perfect for storing a bunch of ships you’d rather not have people screw around with.

  Within seconds of achieving orbit, we were hailed by the AI on the surface; a female voice.

  “This is Gabana. You are now orbiting the TransGalactic Shipping Lines Phoebe Shipyards. This is a private facility, and no trespassing is allowed. Please identify yourselves and your intentions.”

  I knew that she wouldn’t fire on us as long as we stayed in orbit. A more immediate concern was her informing Luna of our presence, which she could do instantly, using SpeedLink.

  “Prepare to receive a secure transmission”, I said, and sent the coded message from my Pod, via the Irie Girl’s radio to the surface below. The seconds ticked by as we waited in silence. If what I’d sent didn’t work, the possibility existed that she’d bring the gamma weapons to bear against us. The batteries fired a concentrated pulse of gamma radiation, and while the interior of ships were shielded against it, anything outside a ship that was the least bit sensitive could definitely be screwed with. This was particularly true of engines, fuel (or oxygen) cells, and any kind of electronics, like sensors or comm gear. Getting shot with a gamma bean would certainly disable a ship, and as experiences went, it was one I wanted to avoid. We were all visibly relieved when the AI finally responded.

  “Maintenance mode engaged”, the AI replied. I relaxed a bit. We were in.

  “Lower defense grid, sector Bravo, Tango, six, seven, six”, I ordered.

  “Defense grid, sector BT676 disengaged”, she said. I handed my Pod over to Alfie.

  “Land at those coordinates”, I said. He keyed them into his console, and handed the Pod back to me.

  “Hokay boss, we landing”, he said, grinning broadly, as I felt the engines kick in. I guess he was happy we weren’t being shot at. I was pretty happy about that, too.

  We landed beside a cargo ship that was a little larger than the Ming Shu. It towered over the Irie Girl, looking like an immense stack of oddly-shaped containers (which it was), stacked atop four sturdy landing struts. As soon as we were down, Cozi and I suited up, and climbed out to look around.

  Phoebe was a gray, barren lump of rock, covered in many places by a layer of loose regolith, just like on Luna. It was desolate and lonely, with ships dotting the landscape, a mile or more apart from one another. They reminded me of pictures I’d seen of some place, idols raised to forgotten gods, destined to an eternity of solitude beneath a glittering veil of stars. I wondered if this was how all graveyards felt.

  Gravity was nearly non-existent, so moving around took some practice. Our suits had built-in sticky shoes, which were useless on the loose soil of the surface; somehow, sticky shoes were smart enough not to attach themselves to small objects, which made one more addition to the growing list of things I didn’t understand.

  The lowest airlock on the cargo ship was in the engineering module, which was still a good thirty feet off the ground. You could climb up to it via a ladder on one of the landing struts, if you had to. Spaceports are equipped with retractable gantries and elevators, allowing easy access to cargo bays on even the largest ships, but we weren’t in a port. I had no intention, low gravity or not, of trying to muscle all our cargo containers up that ladder and into engineering. I clicked on my suit radio.

  “Gabana”, I said. “Can you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear”, she said. “May I ask who you are?”

  “You can call me Captain Hook “, I said, grinning. Cozi had a confused look on his fac
e, meaning that as usual, he didn’t get the joke. I shrugged in reply, a gesture largely wasted in a spacesuit.

  “Are there any portable gantries here?”

  “There are three of them.”

  “Please send one to my current location”, I said. “I’m at the TGS Falco.”

  “I’m powering it up now. It will take a few minutes to bring it fully online. Please remain clear of the Falco until the gantry is in place.”

  “ETA?”

  “Thirty-four minutes”, she replied.

  “Roger”, I said. “Also, limit the recording of this session to your maintenance log only. As of now, Speedlink access will be limited to answering incoming queries. No other communications are allowed without my direct authorization. Acknowledge, please.”

  “Acknowledged”, she said. Technically, the AI was not in maintenance mode. I’d executed an embedded mnemonic, and as a result, whatever I ordered would be carried out, period. Only a handful of people at TGS had access to this particular code, and I was one of them. This was the same thing Angela feared she was infected with. I felt bad about using it, but then again, I didn’t see any other way to get what I wanted.

  I doubted anyone would be checking in on Phoebe; my office was about the only one that even kept track of it. If anyone needed a ship from here, they were supposed to go through us on Luna. Of course, that didn’t preclude them from getting on Speedlink to see what was available out here, first. Not to mention, AI’s do have a tendency to chat, and an AI that wasn’t answering would set off all sorts of alarm bells. With my instructions, Gabana would behave more or less naturally, if anyone made contact with her. Even then, she wouldn’t be saying anything about our being there.

  We had half an hour to kill, so we used the time to unload our cargo from the Irie Girl, which mostly involved unceremoniously heaving the plasteel containers out of the cargo hold door, and watching them gently float to the surface of the moon, fifteen feet below. Once they were out, we jumped down ourselves, and stood around waiting for the gantry to show up.