Belt Three

‘Maybe. Maybe. What do you think?’

He shrugged. ‘You’ve got the implant in my head. I’ll think whatever you tell me to think.’

She glared at him but didn’t seem to have anything to say to that. Behind her, the stars on the screen vanished.

‘Why did you tell me all this, Keldra?’ he asked.

‘I want you to know what we’re up against,’ she said. ‘This is the enemy: the Worldbreakers and whoever made them. This is what we’re fighting.’

‘You don’t need me to know anything about that,’ Jonas said. ‘It won’t make me help you run this ship more efficiently. You’re not telling me what we’re doing in Santesteban, which might be more useful.’

Her sarcastic laugh was weaker than usual. ‘You’ll find out when we get there.’

‘You told me your theories about the Worldbreakers because you wanted an audience. You’ve been working on these theories on your own for years, and now you want the validation of someone saying they agree with you. Well, you won’t get it from me, not while I’m your slave. While you’ve got the implant in my head, I’ll believe whatever you tell me to believe.’ He tilted his head forward and pulled the back of his shirt collar down with one hand, exposing the back of his neck. ‘Deactivate your triggers and then I can tell you what I really think.’

Keldra stood scowling at him for a moment, as if she were considering it, but then strode back out of the bridge. ‘Get back to work.’

A few hours out from Santesteban, Keldra walked into Jonas’s cabin and tossed another bundle of clothes at him: a grey business suit from his wardrobe on the Coriolis Dancer, along with some jewellery suitable for a formal true-born gathering. ‘You wear that tomorrow.’

‘You’re letting me off the ship at Santesteban, then?’

‘You’re a true-born business owner,’ Keldra said. ‘You ran the LN-411 mining operation. When the Worldbreaker showed up you packed up and ran like the coward you are.’

‘Should have fought, yeah. We’ve been through this.’

‘Shut up. You didn’t have your hauler ship with you when the Worldbreaker arrived. It was off making a delivery. You only had your private escape shuttle, so you had to abandon most of your operation. You had space to take your free-willed employees and the most valuable bits of equipment. The hab system core, some other things. Here’s a list.’

Jonas glanced at the data pad she handed to him. Miscellaneous bits of technology, the valuable and portable stuff: it was what he would have chosen to save if her story were true. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Where’s this going?’

‘During the journey, you decided you didn’t want to pay your employees, so you slave-spiked them all. They struggled, and the shuttle took some damage.’

‘Is that something you think I’d do?’

‘Yes, it is. But that doesn’t matter. It has to be part of the story.’ She snapped her fingers and a belt chart appeared on the pad in Jonas’s hand, with a line picking out his imaginary course. ‘You got as far as the Kellman trading post. Kellman didn’t have the parts to repair the shuttle, so you sold it for scrap. You couldn’t sell the servitors there because they were illegal; no paperwork. So you bought passage on the Remembrance of Clouds, a perfectly innocent freighter, which was heading to Santesteban. If you look at the ship’s logs you’ll find it was at Kellman at the right time.’

‘I’m sure I will. So what’s the plan? I take it you’re not letting me go with some servitors and a hab core.’

‘You’re going to meet the owner of the city.’ Another click of Keldra’s fingers, and a man’s face appeared on the pad. He looked somewhere in his fifties, completely hairless, with flabby, unhealthy looking features. ‘You can get in to see him because you’re a true-born and you have things that he’ll want. You’re going to him because you want to offload the servitors: you don’t have the black market connections to sell them, but you know that he won’t care that they’re illegal. The reason he’ll talk to you is because of the hab core. Santesteban’s life support is in a poor state because the owner doesn’t like paying full price for anything. Your used hab core is exactly the sort of deal he’d want, but it’s legally yours so you’re not in so much of a hurry to get rid of it, as you are the servitors. You could take it to another city if you thought you could get a better deal.’

Jonas paused as he took all this in. ‘So what’s the job? I’m guessing we’re pulling off some kind of con. What do I do when I get in?’

‘You sell the servitors. You sell the hab core if you can get a good price. Then you spend a few hours hobnobbing with true-borns, drinking champagne out of real glass glasses, or whatever. Then you come back here. If you try to leave…’ She tapped the back of her neck.

‘Come on, Keldra. You need me for something more than just getting better prices for your stolen goods. Tell me the plan and maybe I can help.’

‘When did you think I started trusting you? I’ve told you all you need to know.’

‘All right.’ As she turned to leave he called after her. ‘Who’s the mark, anyway? I mean, the city owner. What’s his name?’

‘Wendell Taylor Glass.’

Chapter Six (#u07380660-f6c8-5767-815e-6d31e168627f)

Santesteban was a dark grey lozenge thirty kilometres long, once a droplet of iron that had spilled out of a planet’s molten core, now swarming with the signs of habitation. The city’s first owner had spun the rock up around its long axis, and its surface was studded with solar panels, heat sinks, and high-grav starscrapers. One end of the lozenge tapered to a point that formed the base of the counter-rotating docking spindle, and a dozen ships nuzzled against their docking pylons amidst tangles of boarding tunnels and fuel lines. Rickety looking freighters and light cruisers, some of them sporting visible weapon emplacements and the skull-and-gun motifs of pirates, floated next to the glittering playthings of the true-born elite.

Keldra furled the sail a safe distance from the city and made the final approach using thrusters, while Jonas exchanged messages with the weary voice of traffic control. Assigned a pylon, the Remembrance of Clouds began the careful process of docking.

Jonas made his way to the docking airlock at the tip of the Remembrance’s spine. Floating with his arm hooked through a handhold, he could feel the gentle shudders running through the walls as the ship made contact with the spindle. A dozen servitors, the mind-wiped husks of his mining foremen from LN-411, hung around the wall behind him, their microgravity movement programmes keeping them inhumanly still. Keldra had shaved their heads and dressed them in orange coveralls. Strapped to the back of one was the life support core, a bulky mass of machinery that would have taken two strong men to lift under gravity. It took a few moments for Jonas to realize that the servitor carrying the core had been Matton. His face was skull-like with his beard gone.

I’ll find a way to save all of us, Jonas had told Matton as the Remembrance of Clouds bore down on them, while Matton had told Jonas that he could only save himself. In the end, Matton had won the argument and lost his life. Jonas still couldn’t think of anything he could have done to save his crew, but the feeling that he’d failed them persisted.

On the airlock’s monitors he could see servitors in city issue vacuum suits working to attach fuel and power lines to the Remembrance’s ports. A light went green, indicating that the airlock connection was in place. Jonas cycled through the airlock and then floated along the white tunnel of the pylon into Santesteban’s docking spindle.

After weeks cooped up on the Remembrance of Clouds with only Keldra for company, Jonas felt a catch in his breath as he emerged into the huge space filled with noise, colour, and people. The interior of the spindle was a polished steel wall broken by the hatches to docking pylons. Automatic transfer lines ran along the surface, their varying speeds distinguished by colourful patterns. Jonas climbed hand-over-hand across increasingly fast lines until he was on a true-born-only express line towards the city. The servitors followed him faithfully, but he made sure not to do more than glance at them: a self-assured true-born didn’t acknowledge his servitors in public.

The express line took him past an open pylon gate where an inter-city liner’s passengers were disembarking. The few experienced microgravity travellers were already on transfer lines, but most of the people were struggling to keep their drifting suitcases in check. Tank-borns, all of them, in utilitarian jumpsuits. Despite their drab appearance, all of these tank-borns must have done very well for themselves if they could afford passage on an inter-city liner. Many of the stragglers would be immigrants taking the only inter-city voyage of their lives.

It wouldn’t be proper for a true-born to make eye contact with passing tank-borns, but Jonas watched the travellers enviously from the corner of his eye. He wished he could lose himself in the throng and set up a new life on Santesteban. With the last of Gabriel’s assets gone he’d have to drop the name in order to avoid contact with his family. He’d drop the true-born pretence; Gabriel’s Immolation would finally be complete. The idea felt like a betrayal, both of Gabriel’s memory and that of his crew, but it might be the only way to survive.

But that was impossible, in any case. The implant sat at the top of his spine like a bomb waiting to go off if he didn’t get back to the Remembrance on time. There was a chance Keldra was bluffing, but he didn’t think it was likely.

A free-floating attendant with a puffer belt spotted Jonas and moved over to meet him as he reached the end of the line. She was tall, with slender limbs and a bulbous, shaved cranium. It looked as though she had been raised in microgravity, part of a tank-born subculture that could never live in their own city’s high-grav areas or travel on a high-acceleration ship. She folded her long body briefly in a microgravity bow, and then extended a datapad towards him. ‘Your passport, sir?’ Her voice was politely apologetic, as if ashamed to submit a true-born to such a humiliating process.

Jonas reined in his emotions to present a self-confident face, and touched his forged passport to the datapad then held it up for the attendant to inspect. She consulted the pad and nodded. ‘Gabriel Reinhardt, Remembrance of Clouds?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Reason for your visit?’

‘Business. I’m here to see Wendell Taylor Glass. He’s expecting me.’ Jonas had sent a message before they had docked, putting himself on Glass’s schedule.

The attendant made a note on the pad. ‘There’s a taxi waiting for you, sir. Enjoy your stay in Santesteban. Is there anything I can do for you?’

‘Please have my servitors and cargo taken to a secure storage area.’

The attendant glanced at the servitors that were lined up behind Jonas. ‘We can put them in a store room here in the spindle for 800 credits an hour. Is that…?’

Jonas waved dismissively, as if the mere mention of such a small amount of money was distasteful to him.

‘Very good, sir.’ The attendant handed Jonas a wafer-pad storage ticket. He directed the servitors to follow her, and then skimmed her one-credit tip from the spending money he had convinced Keldra to give him. The attendant opened a door to let him through a rotation transfer hub and into the city proper. He saw her puffing away at the head of the line of servitors.

On the other side of the rotation transfer hub was a slowly spinning cylindrical concourse with walls of bare iron. It was swarming with people, many of them spidery low-grav tank-borns, moving around elegantly using puffer belts, or swimming through the air with membranous wings built into their jumpsuits. There was a steady stream of travellers struggling against the inertia of their luggage, and loitering freighter crews hooked into crannies in the wall. Jonas didn’t make eye contact with anyone. When true-borns passed through places like this they did so quickly, on their way to somewhere more luxurious.