Belt Three

Keldra dragged Jonas around the orbital corridors of each ring, showing him each room. Besides modifying the bridge to suit her one-person control, it looked as if she had changed little from Jonas’s second-hand memory of the Thousand Names. She had also painted murals on various walls and ceilings: images of the Earth from space, or scenes of its surface as she imagined it to have looked, in big, messy brush-strokes of green and blue. Every image included the white scrawls of clouds across the sky.

It looked as if Keldra had made more changes to the second ring. The engineering workshops were still there, but the rest of the ring was packed with servitors and all the support machinery needed to sustain so many of them, as well as the prison cells where Jonas had been kept. Now that the ship was underway the servitors shambled through a simple daily routine, feeding and exercising themselves. A few performed maintenance tasks, replacing worn-out pipes or cleaning the graphite from the air scrubbers. Besides generally being physically fit, there was no pattern to the servitors’ appearance, and Keldra hadn’t given them the uniforms or liveries that most servitor-owners used.

The door of one of the store rooms in the second ring was locked with a heavy bar, linked to an iris-recognition lock screwed to the wall next to it. It looked as though the lock had been installed recently, while Keldra had left Jonas locked in his cabin. She hauled him up to the door, seemingly just to point it out.

‘That’s off-limits,’ she said. ‘If I catch you so much as looking at that door, you’re wiped. Understand?’

‘I’ve already seen your stolen goods and illegal servitors. What could be worse than…oww!’

Keldra jabbed the nerve gun into his side and sent a shock running through his body. ‘It’s off-limits. Do you understand?’

‘All right! I understand.’

Aft of the grav-rings was the cargo bay. Keldra didn’t take Jonas into it, but she showed it to him through the grimy windows of the docking control room that looked out on the interior of the bay, turning on the floodlights to bathe the brightly-coloured shipping containers in a sterile white light. Like the Dancer’s, the bay was non-rotating and without air, little more than a radiation shield wrapped around a volume of vacuum, with the ship’s spine running down the centre. Half of the outer surface was a door that could open to space, and it was on this that Keldra had painted the huge Earth-and-clouds mural that Jonas had seen on the Coriolis Dancer’s bridge screen.

Beyond the cargo bay were the main heat radiation fins, although, Keldra explained proudly, most of the ship’s surface could act as a radiation system in an emergency. Behind the fins was the reaction drive and its fuel tanks. Despite its size, this was a secondary drive, intended for close city approaches where a sail couldn’t be used, and as a backup, in case the sail failed. It could provide more acceleration than the sail, but not for long before the fuel tanks were exhausted.

To Jonas’s relief, Keldra didn’t take him into the unpressurized maintenance crawl-spaces that ran through it, but she described it to him in the loading control room. Most of the technical details washed past him, but he didn’t think she was showing off, as such, she just wasn’t used to translating her Engineer-caste language for the benefit of a layperson.

Keldra didn’t go into detail about the ship’s weapons, but Jonas didn’t think there was more to them than he’d seen. The main armaments were a dozen missile turrets, spaced around the ship’s hull to provide a near-complete firing sphere, but unable to concentrate much fire on any one target. There were also the Worldbreaker-killing nukes, but each one was a massive investment of time and money, and he didn’t think she would want to use one except against a Worldbreaker. The small missile turrets might be used to shoot down incoming missiles, but the Remembrance had almost no armour. It could hold unescorted mining haulers to ransom, but it wouldn’t last long against a city patrol boat, still less a Solar Authority cruiser.

After the tour they rode the transit module back to the first ring. Keldra fell silent, but she looked at him as if expecting him to say something.

Jonas decided to fill the silence. ‘So, where are we going?’

‘Columbia. The civil war there means lots of unprotected refugee ships. We need to start building another nuke.’

‘How noble.’

‘Fuck you.’

He licked his lips, thinking back to Olzan’s memory. Keldra was emotionally vulnerable, open to manipulation, he was sure; he just had to find the right key. It was worth a try.

‘You know, when you told me about your crusade against the Worldbreakers, I thought you were an idealist. I thought you believed in a perfect world.’ He pronounced the last two words deliberately, hoping that they’d strike a nerve.

Keldra’s face went pale. She broke eye contact and turned away.

‘You’re right that we ought to fight the Worldbreakers,’ he went on. ‘We’ve given up, collectively, as a species. We all just climb over one another to get to the top of the heap, while the Worldbreakers make the heap smaller and smaller. There ought to be more people living in a perfect world.’

The words made her flinch. Jonas suppressed the urge to smile as he moved in for the kill.

‘What you’re doing isn’t fighting back, and you know it. You’re nothing but a common pirate with an obsession. You should find an effective way to strike against the Worldbreakers, and if you can’t do that you should find a way to live without killing people.’

The transit module had come to rest in the first ring.

‘Tour’s over,’ Keldra spat as she unclipped herself. ‘You know where your cabin is.’ She pushed Jonas out of the module and then closed its doors and departed for the second ring.

A few moments later, as he closed the door of his cabin, he felt the gentle drifting sensation of the ship rotating to reposition its sail. Keldra had changed course.

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

Jonas sat at the desk in his cabin and pushed the lid of the useless terminal down until it was flush with the desktop. He flexed his fingers like a pianist about to play. His hands were steady, but he could feel the nervousness in his chest. It was just possible that what he was about to do would trigger Keldra’s implant and kill him.

‘Open virtual office,’ he said.

Nothing happened.

It had been too much to hope that Olzan had left his implant on the default settings. Most administrators with implants set the commands to something more personal. There was no point in making them obscure – no one could use the implant but the person in whose brain it was implanted – but if Olzan had set the command to something idiosyncratic then Jonas might never be able to guess it.

‘Access admin functions,’ he said. That had been his command when he had been Gabriel’s administrator back on Oberon. Still nothing. ‘Virtual office, open. Open office. Open desktop. Admin functions. Admin office.’

It took Jonas a few minutes to get through all the command combinations he could think of. If Keldra had a bug in his quarters then she’d know what he was trying to do, but he didn’t think she did: implanting him had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, and since then he’d been either in his quarters or with her the whole time, so there was no time in which she could have planted anything.

No luck with any phrase that he tried. If the trigger was an obscure voice command then he might never find it, but it was possible that it was something non-verbal.

He clapped his hands together and then pulled them apart, as if conjuring the virtual desktop out of the air. Nothing. He tried clapping twice in quick succession. Three times. Four, five, six. Any more than that and it felt too unwieldy to be convenient. He didn’t think Olzan would have wanted to start applauding the air whenever he wanted to work.

Perhaps clicking his fingers would be more Olzan’s style. He tried once. Twice. Three times—

Icons exploded into the air in front of him, whirling around for a moment as they tried to anchor themselves in space, before settling onto the surface of the desk like ghostly ornaments. In the centre of the desk was a rectangular pad with the implant’s general status report.

2510-AUG-14

Last login: 2503-FEB-03

Warning: Possible implant damage. Diagnostic needed.

0 unread messages.

Jonas waved his hand through the icon representing the implant’s saved memories. A list of memories scrolled onto the middle of the desk, each identified by a time/location stamp. There were a few dozen, covering the years from 2498 to 2503.

Jonas scanned down the list and found Olzan’s memory of giving Keldra the tour. It was dated 2502-NOV-01. There were half a dozen memories after that point, the last one recorded on the same date as Olzan’s last login to the virtual office. If there was something he could use against Keldra, it would most likely be in one of those later memories, recorded while she had been on board.

The next memory after Keldra’s tour had a timestamp of 2502-DEC-14. Jonas attempted to play it.

Implant malfunction. Playback unavailable.

Of course. That would have been too easy. He guessed the implant malfunction was deliberate hacking on Keldra’s part. Implants were Earth-tech, their workings only partially understood. It might be that disabling the memory playback was easier than deleting the stored memories themselves.

He tried a few other memories. All the memories after Keldra’s tour were similarly locked.

He tried the memory of Keldra’s tour. He knew the implant could play that one…

Implant malfunction. Playback unavailable.

Jonas smiled. It seemed that Keldra’s hacking was imperfect. If the right trigger phrase had got around the block for that memory, then it was possible that different triggers – phrases, images, or sensations – would allow him to play back other memories.

He had to hope there was something in one of those memories that would help him to manipulate Keldra. The implant meant that he couldn’t overpower her, or slip away into a city; but if he played her right, she would deactivate the implant and let him go.