Belt Three

Keldra’s face swam back into focus. Jonas flexed his fingers and found that they responded. He blinked, trying to clear his head. ‘You didn’t wipe me,’ he said.

‘The implant’s in dormant mode. I just need to say the word and you’re wiped.’

He rubbed his wrists. The cuffs were gone.

‘There are some other triggers too,’ Keldra continued. ‘If you try to hurt me, even indirectly, it’ll knock you out. If you’re off the ship for more than twenty-four hours without my say so, it’ll kill you.’

‘Sounds pretty foolproof,’ he said. With his mind still foggy he couldn’t think of a way around the restrictions, and those were just the restrictions Keldra was telling him about. ‘Why?’ he asked.

‘You nearly killed me. I’ve got a system in place to monitor my vitals, so servitors came and revived me. But you nearly beat me. That means you’ve got skills I can use.’

He nodded slowly. That was true, but he didn’t think it was the real reason. ‘And you want someone to talk to,’ he said.

That threw her. She glared at him, but said nothing.

‘You want someone to talk to, and you want someone to watch. Don’t you? Killing that Worldbreaker was sweeter because someone saw you do it.’

She glanced up at the painted clouds. ‘They stole from you as well.’ She put her hand on the nerve gun at her hip, and a sideways jerk of her head directed him to the door.

Keldra took Jonas around the ring to the crew living area. They went through a lounge, where a threadbare couch faced a big wall-screen, and a dining room with a doorway through which a cluttered kitchen was visible. The next corridor had eight cabin doors leading off it, and they looked like part of the original ship design, not later modifications. Being pilot as well as captain was meant to burn people out with the overload of responsibilities, but he thought Keldra must be doing the jobs of half a dozen other people, as well.

She bundled him into one of the cabins. ‘I’ll be back for you later.’ She shut the door, and he heard the mechanism click as the hard lock engaged.

The cabin was not much larger than the prison cell, but it had more comforts. There was a padded bunk built into the wall, and a water-conserving shower. There was a desk terminal, but it didn’t respond when Jonas pressed its power button. He checked under the desk and found that the terminal had been gutted, the parts no doubt finding their way into Keldra’s nest or some other modification project elsewhere in the ship.

He sat at the useless desk and idly fingered the back of his neck where Keldra had injected the implant. He thought he could feel something, numbness, or an irregularity of the skin, but he knew it was his imagination. An implant injection wound was undetectable.

He had to find some way to escape from her, and now it meant escaping from the implant’s control as well. He wondered briefly if some of the implant programming she mentioned had been a bluff, but dismissed the idea. He knew enough implant engineering to know that everything Keldra had said was possible, and he didn’t think that she was one to bluff, not for any length of time. It wasn’t that she was honest, but he didn’t think she was subtle, either.

He needed to escape from her, and, more than that, he wanted to defeat her, to avenge the deaths of his crew. He tried to channel that anger, to make something useful of it, to formulate a plan, but he couldn’t concentrate. All he could think of was the sight of the Scriber ship vanishing into the green beam, and the Worldbreaker cracking apart.

An hour later the door lock clicked and Keldra opened it without knocking. When Jonas got up, she threw a bundle into his arms. Frayed blue servitor overalls, with the logo of some minor freight company on the shoulder.

He tossed the clothes onto the bed. ‘You want me to get changed now?’

‘No. Come with me.’

He followed her into the corridor as she stalked off. ‘You can’t win, you know,’ he called after her.

‘What?’

‘You can’t beat the Worldbreakers. I did some calculations. From what my ship was carrying, you couldn’t have enriched enough weapons-grade uranium for a warhead that size. I don’t know if you got it all from mining ships or bought it on the black market, but that missile must have burned through your loot from a dozen kills.’ Keldra didn’t say anything, but she wasn’t good at bluffing; Jonas could tell he was right. ‘You can’t even attack until they’ve finished eating, so you couldn’t defend a city from one. You’ve killed six Worldbreakers. Do you know how many there are?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘There are tens of thousands, and for all we know they’re making more of themselves, down beneath the veil. Even if every city used all its resources to build nukes to fight them, they would still keep coming. This isn’t a war you can win. This isn’t a war at all, and if it ever was then the Worldbreakers won it a long time ago.’

Keldra grabbed the front of his shirt and pushed him into the wall, just as she had in the shuttle bay. ‘You don’t talk to me like that.’

Jonas looked into her eyes, not blinking, not even raising his voice. ‘You killed my crew and God knows how many other people. You can wipe me, or I’ll talk to you howsoever I like.’

‘They should have fought.’

‘They didn’t fight because they couldn’t win, and they knew that. Do you really think you’re justified in murdering people because they won’t join in with your futile gesture of defiance?’

‘I don’t care what you think of me.’

‘I think you do. Otherwise why do you want me around?’

‘Shut up and follow me. I’ll give you the tour.’

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

Olzan strapped himself into the transit module and gestured for the new recruit to join him. ‘I’ll give you the tour.’

The girl hesitated, still in the docking airlock. She had a rectangular face and a frizz of blonde hair, tied back but with a few strands floating out at odd angles. She’d come dressed in an engineering jumpsuit and had an overnight bag floating over her shoulder, just as Olzan had asked. She held herself a little awkwardly, keeping her body stiff rather than letting it float naturally. Olzan knew she’d been a worker in the city’s spine, so she’d have microgravity experience; he guessed her awkwardness was due to nerves. When she entered the module and strapped herself into a seat she did so competently enough.

Olzan put on a cocky smile and rolled into his normal half-ironic introductory speech as the transit module started to move.

‘Welcome to the Thousand Names. Most reliable ship in the Cygnus Group, maybe in the whole of Belt Three. She’s 20 years old, built in the Cassiopeia shipyard, though we’ve made a few tweaks of our own since then. The cargo bay holds 10,000 tonnes, and we run the grav-rings at a breezy 0.67 gee. Owner’s a guy named Wendell Taylor Glass, but he leaves us to pick our own routes and cargoes.’ The transit module settled in to the forward ring’s transit hub, and the door opened. Vazoya was leaning against the far wall, arms folded. Her facial tattoos were neon-blue today. ‘We go where the solar wind takes us, my friend,’ Olzan concluded with a flourish, as he and Keldra disembarked. ‘It’s a life of freedom and adventure.’

Vazoya glared critically at the module’s occupants. ‘You’re full of crap, Olzan.’

He beamed. ‘And this is my charming first mate. How are things, Vazoya?’

Vazoya ignored him. ‘Keldra, right? Don’t believe a word our captain says. Ship’s a junk heap barely holding together. Owner’s a scumbag who’d kill us all if he found a way to make money out of it.’

‘Vazoya, my dear! You could be a little more positive while we have a new recruit on board.’

‘She’ll come with us. You’ll come with us, won’t you, Keldra? Anything beats rotting on Pandora.’

Keldra’s voice was guarded; she looked deeply uncomfortable with being on a strange ship. ‘I’m not sure yet.’

‘I saw your engineering test scores. You’re coming with us.’

Olzan ignored his first mate and strode off along the central corridor with Keldra half-jogging after him. ‘And this is the forward ring, where we keep the crew quarters, kitchen, recreation area, medical bay, and most importantly …’ he swung the door wide, ‘the bridge! How’s it going, Brenn?’

Brenn looked up from the pilot console blearily, as if Olzan had pulled him out of a daydream. ‘We’re fuelled up and the cargo’s stowed. Our window for the spin to Xanadu lasts another twelve hours. We can set sail as soon as the new recruit’s on board.’

‘New recruit’s here, Brenn.’

‘Oh! Hello.’ Brenn looked startled, even though Keldra had been in the doorway for several seconds. He could sense everything that happened to the ship, but a lot of the time he only seemed half-aware of his own surroundings. But he was a good kid, and Olzan had never met a pilot who was quite all there in the head.

‘That’s nearly everyone,’ said Olzan. ‘Just got to introduce you to our engineer.’

Keldra had moved into the bridge and was peering at the captain’s console, or maybe at the hash of wiring beneath it. It looked as though her interest in ship engineering had overcome her nervousness, and from the way she was looking at the wiring, Olzan could easily believe she was the genius engineer her scores showed. She looked up at him with a puzzled expression.

‘There’s just the four of you? How do you manage without a full crew?’