CHAPTER SEVEN
Jaka sent Ulan in first. His suit had the toughest armor, so it made sense. The poor fool actually sounded proud to be the stalking horse. “Affirmative, Captain!” he said and marched toward the airlock with his head high.
Anton knew better than to comment, but he did roll his eyes. Inside his reflective helmet visor, with no video link, he could at least do that without Jaka noticing. He glanced back and forth between the airlock and the big frosted window over the main entrance, where the dino and a bird in a travel sphere looked down at the four of them, their outlines indistinct behind a curtain of condensation.
If it came to trouble, his orders were clear: stand still and let the laser do its job. The targeting bot in his backpack was far below baseline, but it could identify and shoot the targets Jaka had preselected much faster than Anton’s sluggish biological nervous system. And if that made him an obvious target to draw enemy attention while Jaka got away, well…from her viewpoint that wasn’t a problem so much as an added benefit.
He looked up at the dino, who had a combat engineer’s laser in her hands. Anton was well within range, and the dino could tune it so that the diamond window wouldn’t absorb any of the energy at all. She’d probably aim at his chest. He would feel the stab of heat, and then the water in the skin and muscles of his chest would explode. If she had good aim, that might stop his heart right away, and this antique suit wouldn’t be able to keep him alive.
Do it, he thought. I’m an obvious threat. You can see the laser emitter. Kill me now and save yourself. Save both of us.
But the damned dino disappeared from the window, repositioning inside to cover Ulan as he cycled through the airlock.
“Adelmar, you’re next.”
The chimp didn’t bother to reply. He just ambled forward, no rush, no evasion, nor any show of enthusiasm. Anton smiled a little at Adelmar’s utter lack of concern. The chimp knew Jaka was sending him into danger ahead of herself, but he didn’t mind at all. He would do the same, so he didn’t complain.
“You wait out here until we’re inside,” she told Anton. “Make sure nobody’s sneaking around in the dark. The mech said they had a scout up on the roof across the street, and it doesn’t know where she went.”
“Yes,” he replied.
“Yes what? Do you understand what I said?”
“Yes.”
Jaka gave an annoyed sniff. Inside his helmet Anton couldn’t keep from smirking. That tiny, passive defiance felt so good!
Jaka went to the airlock, Tanaca following a meter behind as always. She stood patiently outside while Jaka cycled through, and did not look around as she waited.
Movement caught the corner of his eye. He turned in time to see a black spider shape hurtling directly at his face. It struck him and clung to his visor. Anton gave a sigh of relief. The black underside of the spider mech displayed the word BOO! in bright red letters.
“You’re lucky my laser didn’t zot you,” said Anton.
Daslakh displayed a smirking cartoon face. “That won’t happen. During the ride down I had a long chat with the bot brain you’re carrying on your back. Strictly private, digital only. Nothing you meat brains would understand. Anyway, I’m now on its permanent supersecret Do Not Target list. I worked out a similar understanding with the missile pods.”
“Clever of you.”
“I’m old and cunning. The smarter the weapon, the easier it is to hack. Ulan’s needle rifle is too dumb for me to mess with. Appropriately.”
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll tell Jaka?”
“You’re not exactly chatty with her.”
“She could order me to tell.”
The image on the mech’s underside turned into a stick figure making a shrugging gesture. “I don’t mind if she’s a little afraid of me. I didn’t sign on for a long-term relationship. As soon as we dock someplace after this job, no matter where, I’m going to find a ship or a payload leaving the Jovian system and get as far away from Jaka as I can.”
“Can you see if Tanaca’s gone through yet? There’s a chunk of debris blocking my visor.”
“She’s decontaminating. Not that it will help much. In a week there’ll be as much mold inside that med center as there is out here. You sweaty chunks of meat give off too much delicious skin flakes and mucus. A banquet for microorganisms. Looks like she’s done.” Daslakh moved up to the top of Anton’s helmet.
The rim of the airlock glowed green, indicating it was safe to use. Anton went in and used half a dozen wipes to clean off his suit, stuffing the used ones into the top of the dispenser to be broken down and reassembled with all the dirt and biologicals removed. Daslakh helped him get his back and the laser backpack.
“There! Perfectly clean, except for the millions of spores hiding out in crevices those wipes can’t reach, ready to start feeding on you. This lock really needs a hard UV lamp, but I guess the builders never thought the hab could ever get so messed up.”
Anton passed through the inner door into a short corridor where everyone else had dumped their suits and the backpacks full of supplies. Jaka and Tanaca still wore their skinsuits, minus the bubble helmets. The entire team stood facing off against the crew of the big tug in the central atrium of the medical center.
As he peeled off his own suit Anton had a look at the opposing side. The cyborg stood in the center, hands raised for quiet, his face screen displaying solid white. The dino stood next to the borg in full armor, holding an engineer’s laser. Her helmet was opaque but her posture set off all kinds of atavistic alarms in Anton’s hindbrain. Predator! Danger!
The bird hovered above in his travel sphere. Anton could see now that he was a corvid. The sphere didn’t look armed, but that didn’t mean much. No sign of the mysterious fourth person.
Daslakh slipped between Anton’s feet, and changed color to match the floor. It scuttled silently to one side, lurking behind a planter holding the crumbled remains of a fern. Anton had no orders, so he just stood at the back of Jaka’s group, next to Tanaca.
“I’m sure you’ve already grabbed the best stuff, and that’s fine with me,” said Jaka. “Plenty for everyone here. My team just need a place to rest where we can feel secure. All these weapons are making everyone too jumpy.”
“I do agree no good is served by standing tense with weapons drawn,” said the bird, who seemed to be the centro of the other crew. “As you outnumber us you can display good faith by being first to lay aside your arms.”
“Okay!” said Jaka cheerfully. “Ulan, put up your rifle. Safe enough?” she asked the corvid.
“Missile pods,” said the dino.
“Even if I take them off I’m still linked,” said Jaka. “The same goes for Adelmar. You’ll just have to trust us.”
“Perhaps you could leave them outside,” suggested the big cyborg.
“And let them get all dirty with mold and corpse dust? No, thank you.” Jaka looked around the medical center. “By the main door—that looks like a closet. Why don’t we stow the pods there? We’ll want them when we go out, of course.”
“And the laser backpack,” added the dino.
“This whole conversation has taken a very hostile turn, and that makes me sad,” said Jaka, though she still looked as cheerful as ever. “I detest violence, so I agree to your paranoid demands. Anton, take the pods and the backpack and put them in the closet.”
He did as he was ordered. It was a little awkward to manage four missile pods and the laser backpack at once, but he got them into the closet without dropping anything.
“Your turn,” said Jaka. “Stash that laser and whatever else you’re carrying.”
Pera slipped off the powerpack and set her engineer’s laser down on the floor.
“We came aboard to search for certain things amid the wreck, and did not plan to fight. Aside from Pera’s useful laser tool we have no arms to stash,” said Atmin.
“No internals in the borg, or in your little sphere? None you’ll admit to, I guess. That’s fine. See how much I trust you? I won’t even ask to scan anyone.”
Jaka and the bird arranged a division: the earlier group would get the second floor, Jaka’s crew the ground floor, and the teams would continue operating independently outside.
Once the others had retired upstairs, Jaka ordered her group to bed down right in the central atrium, where they could see and be seen. Over private comm she told them, “I want these selfish fools to understand that I’m not afraid of them at all. All of you: act like this is our place and they’re the guests, understand?”
The little mech spoke up from under the chair Jaka had occupied, and it pleased Anton to see her startle just a little. “Why are we even here? They’ve already grabbed any artwork that survived. We should be up at the hub ripping out processors and power systems.”
“My reasons are my reasons,” said Jaka. “You’ll see soon enough. Now: I want everybody rested up for tomorrow, so bed down right now. Use sleep inducers. In six hours we’ll all be up and outside.” Via comm she added, “I want to find that extra person they keep forgetting to mention. These junk-pickers have some scheme running, and I want to know what it is. Daslakh: you keep watch tonight. If you see anyone outside, wake me at once. And if you hear them talking, record everything.”
“I hear and obey,” said the mech aloud, and positioned itself by the main entrance with a good view through the diamond doors.
Anton found a clear spot of floor near Adelmar. The chimp was an old pro, and didn’t need an inducer to sleep whenever the opportunity presented itself. Anton envied him that ability: even back in Fratecea habitat before being traded to Jaka he’d been terrible at falling asleep. He would lie in his narrow bunk, utterly exhausted, but his brain would race out of control.
No risk of that anymore. His brain was now very thoroughly controlled. The compliance implant included a sleep inducer, so that whoever held his codes could knock him out at will. He could access the inducer himself, and yet he hesitated. With Jaka and the others asleep, he had a rare moment of something he could pretend was freedom.
He wished for a way to warn the other crew. Jaka was planning to betray them. That was just a fact, like the law of gravity. He had seen it many times before. Once her crew had enough information, she’d kill or chase off the salvagers and take their stuff.
At least it would be quick. None of the tug’s crew were humans, so they’d be eliminated with brisk efficiency. Not humans. Jaka had uses for them. Anton knew that better than anyone.
He didn’t like the direction his thoughts were heading, so he sent the inducer code and was rewarded with swift oblivion.
Five hours and twenty minutes later Anton awoke. The view through the windows was unchanged, but Jaka’s crew were busy getting into their protective suits. She retrieved the weapons and handed them out as the crew went out through the airlock.
Outside she gave them their orders. “I want to know where the other person is. Daslakh said it looked like a woman, some kind of human. Find her. Adelmar: you search spinward on the right-hand side of this big street. Anton: you take the left side. Ulan: you go antispinward on the right, Tanaca and I will take the other side. Daslakh: see if you can track her from where you spotted her in the first place.”
The mech raised one limb, turning the smart-matter foot at the end into a miniature flesh-colored human hand. “Captain Jaka? What do we do if we find some loot in this hab we’re supposed to be looting?”
“Leave it. We can come back later if it’s worth taking. My guess is these other guys have tagged all the good stuff already—maybe even hidden it. That’s not important right now. Just find the woman. Get moving.”
Anton headed out, grateful for the opportunity to be alone and under nobody’s direction but his own. He had his orders, of course, but how to carry them out was up to him. So his search was diligent but not especially brisk. He turned on the twin headlamps of his antique suit and poked into all the houses, trying to flush out the mystery woman.
The dead didn’t bother him. They were old, dried out and covered with mold and carbon dioxide frost. They were anonymous. Just bodies. He didn’t know any of them. He hadn’t killed any of them himself.
Safdaghar hab must have been a nice place, once upon a time. Anton liked the little courtyards with their dead gardens, and the tree-lined streets. The people who designed and built the hab had tried to make it attractive and comfortable. Almost any random spot would be a good place to sit down and listen to music, or chat with a friend.
They had spoiled it, of course. People always did.
Anton entered a new courtyard and froze. He thought he heard movement in one of the houses. No way to tell which one. He went to the center of the courtyard, where lawn furniture and blueberry bushes lay tangled together in a heap. He moved as slowly and quietly as he could, listening intently.
In the center he stood and listened, slowly turning to shine his headlamps into each of the houses around the courtyard. He had completed about three-quarters of a rotation when he heard a stealthy sound behind him.
Anton whirled and saw movement: the curtain in one doorway was swaying as if someone had just passed through. He ran in pursuit, taking the two steps up to the broad porch in one bound, and bursting through the curtain into a large studio cluttered with overturned furniture and scattered tools. It was a woodworking shop, so in addition to workbenches and tool cases there were chairs, a decorative cabinet, and a suit rack made of wood and aluminum.
He stood in the doorway, listening. There were no other exits, save for windows above head height on the far side, and those were closed.
“I have a laser,” he said aloud. “If you try to attack me it will fire. I know you’re here, so come out.” If his quarry had somehow gotten away, he hoped she couldn’t hear what he was saying.
A figure crawled out from beneath a workbench. Anton was slightly amazed that anyone could fit in the space. She stood—a small, slender woman, obvious even under the coverall she wore over her skinsuit. Her helmet mask was opaque black.
“My name is Anton,” he said. “I was sent to find you. We’ve worked out an arrangement with your crew so you can come back now.”
“I don’t want to,” she said. Her voice was lovely. “It’s not safe for me to be around other humans. Please don’t make me go back.”
“Do you have any weapons?”
“No,” she said. “Just my tools. I’m a tech, not a soldier.”
She moved like a dancer, he thought as she stepped out into a clear patch of floor so he could see her better.
He reviewed Jaka’s orders. She had said she wanted to know where the woman was. She had told all of them to find her. Well, he’d done that, hadn’t he? Jaka hadn’t said anything about what to do next. Eventually he’d have to report, but he felt no urge to rush.
“My name is Anton,” he said. “I’m part of Jaka’s crew from Scapino hab. She got a tip from someone that this wreck was being moved, and figured there might be some good loot on board. What’s your name?”
“Solana,” she said. “I’m with Yanai, the tug. We’re just taking off some artworks before it’s time to aerobrake at Jupiter periapsis. There’s plenty of stuff for everyone. You can go somewhere else in the hab.”
“My centro and the bird worked out a deal. We’re all staying in the med building.”
“I can’t go back there. I have to get to the spoke. Have you told anyone where I am?”
“No,” he said. “Not yet. You can talk to me a while before you go. Please? Where are you from?”
“I live on Yanai. As I said, it’s difficult for me to be around other humans. I mostly stay with the ship or nonhumans.”
“I’m sorry if my presence is disturbing. Why can’t you be around humans? Is it some kind of implant?”
“Something like that. It’s hard to explain. You’re not in any danger, or anything like that. It’s me. That’s why I need to get away.” Her voice was fearful. It had been a long time since anyone had been afraid of Anton, but he remembered the sound.
“Look,” he said. “My centro—Jaka—told me to find you. If I don’t report in she’ll get suspicious. I’ve got an implant of my own, and she can access my senses. So—” He stopped speaking.
“Too late,” said Jaka over the private comm. “You’re a smart guy, Anton, so I like to check on you pretty often. More than you realize. Now, it sounds like you’re trying to do something clever, and I can’t allow that. Bring her back to the med center now. No delays.”
“—you…” he finished when the implant released control of his muscles. “I’m sorry. Jaka just told me to bring you in. She might make me use the laser if you don’t come along.”
“You don’t have a choice,” she said. “I understand. It’s all right.”
Jaka and her satellite Tanaca were waiting inside the med center when Anton and Solana arrived.
“Here’s the mysterious fourth person,” she said as soon as Anton and Solana cycled inside. “We’ve been dying to meet you. Let’s see who you are. Come on, dear, don’t be shy. We’re not about to bite you.”
Solana hesitated, then retracted the cowl of her suit. Without the black faceplate, Anton could see a lovely human female face with flawless golden skin. Only the eyes were covered by a bulky pair of multifunction goggles.
“See?” said Jaka, “No need to go about all masked. You could even ditch those goggles so I can admire your eyes.”
Solana took a step back and shook her head. “I can’t. I need them all the time. It’s a neurological problem.”
Jaka scrutinized Solana’s face in silence, then broke into a big happy grin. “I understand. Don’t worry about a thing. We were just about to have some brunch. Want some? Anton, make some food.”
In the kitchen he heated up a couple of ration packs that seemed vaguely breakfast-like—rice omelets and smoked fruit. When he brought them out, Jaka was sprawled on a couch in the atrium with Tanaca on one side of her and Solana perched nervously on the other.
“Here we are. He’s so useful. So, which hab are you from, dear? Someplace in Jovian space?”
“I live aboard Yanai.”
“I heard that when you told Anton. But surely you weren’t born on Yanai. She doesn’t have a shikyu, does she? Where did you grow up?”
Solana cleared her throat nervously. “I lived on Jiaohui for a while. That’s in the Main Swarm, about point eight AU.”
“Jiaohui…isn’t that a Salibi hab? You’re far too pretty to be one of them.”
“I, um, they took me in when I was little. My home hab was destroyed.”
“How terrible! When was that?”
“About fifteen or sixteen standard years ago. I don’t like to talk about it.”
“I don’t blame you. Not one bit.” Jaka took a big bite of smoked pear and smiled at Solana as she chewed. “Now, I’m very sorry to snoop, but I did happen to overhear you telling Anton you’re planning to go back up to your ship. I’m very sad to hear that. I was hoping we could be friends. You, me, and Tanaca here. All friends together.”
“It’s my neuro problem. The same reason I need the goggles. I’ll be safer on Yanai.”
“Hard luck for your teammates, isn’t it? They’re left to do all the work while you sit up there at the hub doing entertainments and eating fresh-printed meals.”
Solana didn’t respond, but she shifted uncomfortably.
Jaka patted her knee. “It’s all right. Medical necessity and all that. Have you thought about getting any treatment? A higher-order mind can do amazing things with neural pruning. Not cheap, though.”
“Yes,” said Solana. “I’m saving up.”
“Good idea! You’re certainly in the right place to find valuables just lying around for the taking. It seems silly to waste the opportunity just because of some irrational fears.”
Anton stood in silence, watching Jaka with a mixture of admiration and horror. Her ability to use words to box people in was worthy of a higher-level mind.
She continued, “I like you, Solana. I’d like to help you. I presume you’re getting a share of what your team recover in salvage? Because I’d hate to cut into that. You need it. You shouldn’t have to postpone your medical procedure for lack of gigajoules. Let me help. Stay here and earn your share. I’ll guarantee your safety. Watch your back. What do you say?”
Solana’s perfect forehead was furrowed. “I guess…” she said.
“Wonderful! It’ll be great. You’ll see. Don’t worry about a thing.” Jaka finished her brunch and noisily sucked her fingertips clean. “Oh, by the way: I imagine you’re a little concerned about me eavesdropping on Anton. Don’t worry about that. It’s a safety thing. I have to monitor him. You see, he’s a convicted criminal. There’s no telling what he could get up to if I don’t keep him in line. You can’t believe a word he says, either. Don’t trust him. Only me. You can trust me with your life.”
She looked over at Anton and feigned surprise. “Oh, you’re still here! Go start searching for heavy elements. Potassium and up. Bring back whatever you find, and be sure to tell the others.”
Anton spent the next several hours in blissful solitude, going house to house in search of valuable matter. The devastation made him curious. What had happened to Safdaghar? The hab structure was intact, and it wouldn’t be difficult to get power and data running again. Had some tyrannical movement taken power, then destroyed everything in a relentlessly tightening spiral of political purity? Likely, he thought. The scum always rose to the top.
He rigged up a little sledge out of a bed frame and some ropes from a swing, and dragged it behind him as he wandered semi-randomly among the empty buildings collecting junk. At one point his path took him between two houses, in a little alley with blank walls on either side. He saw that somebody had written on one of them in bright crimson paint, “snap blind with broken fangs tearing with no care or will.”
A slogan? he wondered. Or maybe a quote from some protest song? He recalled the early years of the Movement in Fratecea, when he and other activists had done their own share of slogan-painting. Their graffiti had been more prosaic: “Down with the Board!” and “Transfigurance Now!” He liked this surreal scrawl better.
So…had whoever painted this been afraid of being killed for it? Or had they later turned killer, executing those who simply would not agree with whatever it meant? No way to find out. They all were equally dead.
He had been out for six hours when Jaka finally recalled him. “Thought I’d forgotten you? No chance of that. Meet at the children’s playground a hundred meters north of the med center. There’s some stuff we have to discuss in private.”
Anton dragged his sledge back to the clinic building and left it in plain sight of the entrance, then made his way to the playground where Jaka and the others were gathered. It was a small park, no more than fifty meters on a side, all done in bright colors that showed through the black mold. The play surface was tough and spongy, dotted with things to climb, water sprays now embedded in ice, sandboxes, long-dead musical plants, and a cellulose spinner for making dress-up costumes.
Jaka beckoned them over to one of the parent benches along the edge of the playground. “Private channel only, encrypted. Friends, we’ve found our treasure. Forget all this nonsense about art or valuable scrap. That woman’s the real prize.”
“Doesn’t look that special to me,” said Adelmar.
“Oh, but she is. That face, that figure—that’s a custom genome. Somebody paid for her to be perfect.”
“Hardly perfect.” Adelmar tapped the side of his head.
“Exactly. She isn’t perfect. She’s got some mysterious neuro issue. Has to wear goggles. The others said she’s got a phobia about people. Odd, don’t you think?”
Anton spoke up. “She might be a failed prototype. The neuro issues could be unexpected side effects.”
Jaka looked at him in surprise. “You can talk? I forgot. As to your idea, I won’t say it’s impossible, but that doesn’t happen very often nowadays. A fourth-level mind can simulate the whole process of development from zygote to adult and spot any problems before anybody hooks up a single pair of nucleotides.”
Adelmar made an impatient tell-me-more gesture. “Okay, so what makes a girl with a bad brain worth a fortune?”
Jaka smiled, enjoying his frustration. “As I said, accidental brain flaws are vanishingly rare nowadays. Maybe they still get them in low-tech habs where they fertilize by fucking and women bear children like wild animals. But that girl’s too perfect to come out of some sweaty vagina. She was designed, which means her brain was designed. That neuro ‘flaw’ is a deliberate feature.”
“Oh!” Adelmar gave a soft hoot and drummed on the spongy ground with both palms. “You think Kumu, maybe?”
“She’s old enough. And that explains the goggles, and why she’s flying with that crew. None of them look human.”
“So what?” asked Daslakh. “We’re thieves and scavengers, not slavers.”
“I know some people,” said Jaka. “Back at Scapino. People who know people.”
Anton had no idea what Jaka was talking about. He sent a query to the sub-baseline brain aboard the shuttle, asking for data on Kumu relevant to the past thirty years. The little internal library had fifty results—ships, companies, towns, some people with that name, a political movement which once ruled a trillion people. But the obvious answer was a hab.
Kumu was a criminal hab in the Kuiper Belt, about 43 AU out. For a century it was notorious for the creation of Qarinas, humans optimized as sexual playthings. Other worlds and empires had denounced the practice and Kuma’s ruling junta, but did nothing to stop it. Finally in 9934 a shipload of Salibi fanatics had raided the place, taking off several hundred Qarinas, killing most of the hab’s rulers, and wrecking all the molecular-scale printers and gene banks they could find.
Jaka might be right: the woman called Solana might well be one of those liberated Qarinas. The thought made Anton queasy. With Kumu out of business and other Qarina creators running dark for fear of Salibi attacks, the price for a human sexual slave was probably immense. And Jaka had contacts back at Scapino who could find people willing to pay that price.
His former comrades in Fratecea were missing a golden opportunity, Anton thought—but then he wondered if they were missing it. There had been a handful of politicas who’d been taken out of the dormitories and never seen again, all of them notably attractive. Anton had assumed they’d been taken by members of the inner Party, but suddenly he wasn’t sure. Had they been exported in order to improve Fratecea’s balance of payments?
“How to find out?” Adelmar asked Jaka.
“I just have to get her to take off those goggles she’s so desperate to keep on.”
“The dino won’t like it.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll arrange things so that she does it entirely of her own free will.” When Anton happened to look at Jaka he saw her staring back at him with a big smile on her face.
They spent a couple of days working, making a big show of how serious they were about collecting scrap to remove. Twice a day they made a big pile of stuff in the street and then Daslakh would crawl over the pile identifying the composition of each item. It picked up a shiny chain necklace. “Looks like silver—nope, just platinum. Forget it,” it said, and tossed it onto the junk heap. It selected a tool. “Now, this is the real stuff! Fifteen percent tungsten! Definitely a keeper!” The tool went into the much smaller pile of salvage to haul back to the hub.
They saved beryllium (what little they could find), tantalum, thallium, gold, silver, rare-earth elements, and mercury. More than once Daslakh reminded everyone, “You know, I bet most of the useful industrial elements are stored up at the hub. Scavenging people’s personal electronics and hand tools seems like a big waste of time.”
To which Jaka replied, more than once, via the private channel, “Be quiet and keep working. I want those idiots to think we’re serious about salvaging metals.”
Since Anton couldn’t know when Jaka might be looking through his eyes, or listening with his ears, he did his best to avoid the other team. In person he might be tempted to try warning them.
He wound up doing most of the scrap-picking himself. Tanaca kept close to Jaka, who recovered maybe half a dozen items per day. Adelmar was a little more diligent, at least when anyone could see him. He improvised a sack from some curtains and brought it back full of junk.
The bird had warned them about the possibility of booby traps. Jaka was skeptical, but agreed to keep her team close to the medical building, where the others had already searched pretty thoroughly. Privately she told her crew, “I think they’re just trying to scare us off.”
Ulan was the only one to risk going out into the unexplored sections. He was fascinated by Solana and kept trying to cross paths with her “accidentally” until Jaka finally gave him a direct order: “Stay away from her until I tell you otherwise. We don’t want to spook them.”
“I’m just…” he began, obviously with no idea what he was going to say next.
“I said stay away. I don’t want you sneaking looks at her tonight, I don’t want you trying to watch her cleaning up, and I don’t want you following her tomorrow. Avoid her. Got it?”
“This is shit.”
“Put up with it for a day. You’re a big boy. You can do that.”
Anton spent another relatively pleasant day looking for metals worth keeping. With Daslakh’s tutelage he was getting better at spotting them. He did wish that the heavier elements could have a wider range of colors and properties. Too many were shiny gray and dense. Whoever had created this simulation had gotten lazy past mercury, concealing the issue by making most of the heavier elements short-lived so nobody would notice.
He paused for lunch at a stadium made of trees, crowded with dead people. Anton found an unbroken chair among the debris, and set it next to a mosaic-topped table bolted to the ground in the plaza outside the stadium. Nobody but corpses watched him eat. His primitive suit didn’t have a membrane to push food through, so he had to make do with sipping fish broth through a straw.
Safdaghar was very quiet. Back in Fratecea there had always been the sound of vehicles, loudspeakers making announcements, people talking, animals, and machines. Scapino had been much the same—fewer animals, more loud music. The shuttle had been noisy with gurgling sanitary systems, buzzing life-support fans, buzzing cooling pumps, and the voices of Jaka and her crew. But inside Safdaghar there was nothing to make noise. No machines, nothing alive. Nothing but his own breathing and the hum of his air filter.
And something else. He kept himself still, resisting the urge to see what was making the sound. It was an irregular pattering, like hard-gloved fingertips tapping out some chaotic improvised music. The sound was moving, getting gradually louder and closer. Air currents blowing debris? Condensation dripping from the ceiling high above? Some thermal effect?
Finally Anton couldn’t keep himself from turning around, shining the twin headlamps of his helmet around the plaza. The noise vanished as soon as he moved. He looked around, panning methodically across the whole area. Corpses, dead leaves, some unidentifiable mounds of debris, a few tables like his own standing undamaged and unused.
“Is anybody there?” he called aloud. “Anybody?”
“Yes,” said Daslakh via comm. “I want to talk to you. Sit tight.” A moment later Anton heard the little mech’s feet clicking rhythmically on the pavement—very different from the irregular pattering he had heard before. Daslakh jumped onto the table, its shell glowing wine-red, with the silver Gemini design of Fratecea’s emblem shining brightly on its back. “Greetings, Resident! Are you working hard for the greater good of the community?” it said aloud.
“What do you want?”
“I want to talk.”
“I might not be the only one listening.”
“Hey, Jaka! You’re a filthy slaver and you cheat at tic-tac-toe. Wave Anton’s hand if you can hear me.”
“Just reminding you.”
“I can hear your implant’s broadcast frequencies. It’s not talking to anybody right now so maybe we should quit wasting time. I’m kind of worried about her little scheme to sell the Qarina.”
“Fighting exploitation is what got me here,” said Anton. “But I didn’t think you cared.”
“Bios being awful to each other is a pretty constant feature of the solar system. But this particular awfulness is a bigger problem than most. First of all, we could all wind up on some bounty list if anyone finds out. I don’t like drawing attention.”
“You should have thought of that before you signed on with Jaka.”
“Getting off Scapino was very important to me right then. I didn’t have much choice. Anyway. The second problem is that Jaka also has to know that slave-dealing is a serious offense almost everywhere. We’re witnesses. It’s a lot easier to enjoy ill-gotten gains if nobody knows how you got them.”
“If she wants me dead there’s nothing I can do about it,” said Anton. “She can kill me with a thought.”
“And anyway, just because trillions of people are being awful every second doesn’t mean we have to help.”
“Are you being…moral?” asked Anton, only partly in sarcasm.
“Never mind. It’s—” Daslakh’s tone suddenly shifted. “But then I found out that the loan shark had hired the mercenaries to do debt collection, so that instead of protecting me, they’d be hunting me, too. Needless to say, I had to find a ship out of Scapino right away. Fortunately, our beloved leader Jaka happened to be looking for a technician, because apparently none of you sausage-fingered biologicals knows which end of a hammer to use for welding optical fibers. One short-term contract later I was on the shuttle with the rest of you getting myself out of there, body and mind.”
“What?”
“Of course if I had known I would wind up inside a wrecked hab full of mold and emotional drama I might have taken my chances with the loan shark after all. Anyway, from here I figure I’ll make my way outsystem. Maybe the Uranus Trojans. And…she’s gone.”
“Jaka was listening?”
“Couldn’t you tell? Your implant’s signal traffic went up by two orders of magnitude. Back to quiet mode now. Point is, the Qarina plan is dangerous. I’m going to try to convince Adelmar. He’s a realist. Can you talk to Ulan?”
“Anyone can talk to him. He never listens.”
“True—doubly so right now. It’s shocking to see what happens to his blood flow when that Solana person is around. You’re bad enough, but with him I’m kind of surprised there’s enough oxygen reaching his brain to keep him conscious. I guess his brain doesn’t really need that much to begin with.”
Anton got up and panned his helmet lights around the plaza again. “Did you sense anything moving around here before you pinged me?”
“No. Can’t say I was looking for anything, either. Why?”
“Never mind. I guess I’d better get back to work.”
Just then he heard Jaka’s voice inside his helmet, on the group channel. “All of you, come back to the clinic. I’ve got an announcement to make and I want you all here.”
“What do you suppose that’s all about?” asked Daslakh.
“I’m afraid to find out. Let’s go.”
When Anton and Daslakh got back to the medical building, everyone was gathered in the atrium—both Jaka’s team and the group from the tug. Jaka gestured impatiently when Anton cycled in. “Get out of that suit and come here.”
He shucked it off and skipped the wipe-down stage. She pointed to a spot on the floor right next to her, so he stood there.
“Sorry for the delay, but I couldn’t start without Anton. He’s the reason I called you all together.” Jaka got up and began to circle him, gradually spiraling out beyond arm’s reach.
“You see,” she said, “Anton’s supposed to do what I tell him. That’s part of his criminal service mandate. But the other day I gave him an order and he tried to get clever and disobey me. It was a simple order: find your missing teammate. After all, a wrecked hab is no place for one person to be wandering alone, and I was worried about her. But silly, silly Anton thought he could play games with the exact wording of what I told him, even though he knew what I meant. He found her, but decided not to say anything. If I hadn’t checked up on him, poor Solana might still be out there.”
“I—” he began, and then his mouth and face froze.
“No, don’t try to confuse everyone with your excuses.” She turned to her audience. “He’s very clever about that kind of thing. He used to make propaganda for a vicious dictatorship. Don’t believe a word he says.”
Jaka circled around behind Anton, so she could see everyone at once. “So now he has to be punished. I want everyone to watch, so you can see that you’re in no danger from this convicted political extremist. His compliance implant is under my control.”
She turned to face Anton and sent the command code via comm. He felt the compliance implant activate, and suddenly Anton was just a spectator, unable to do anything but watch as his brain and body obeyed the implant instead of Anton.
He could see the others ranged about the room—Ulan watching the scene eagerly, Adelmar paying more attention to the spectators, Tanaca oblivious as always to everything except Jaka. Daslakh had disappeared. The members of the other crew watched over the edge of the upstairs gallery that ran around the atrium. The cyborg’s face screen was blank, the dino cocked her head and lashed her tail in puzzlement, the bird was motionless and attentive, and Solana’s mouth was open in horror.
“Anton, I want you to bite off the top joint of the little finger of your left hand,” said Jaka. This was all for show. She could move his muscles at will.
“No!” Solana called out as Anton raised his hand to his mouth.
“Stop, Anton,” said Jaka. She turned to look up at Solana. “You don’t want me to punish him?”
“Please don’t,” said Solana. “He didn’t do anything wrong. I asked him not to tell anyone, that’s all.”
“You’re telling me you’re the one to blame for his disobedience?”
“I guess so.” Solana sounded a little puzzled.
Jaka paused for a second, as if coming to some important decision. “I’ll tell you what: I won’t punish Anton for disobeying me if you take off those goggles.”
Atmin gave a loud caw of alarm. “Solana, do not let yourself forget what will befall if you should do as this intruder asks.”
“Well?” asked Jaka. “I’m not going to wait. Take them off now.”
“I need them,” said Solana.
“Anton, do as I told you.”
Anton’s finger was between his teeth. He could feel his jaw muscles tense, and the pain from his joint, and the crunching sensation as teeth met cartilage.
“Stop!” Solana called, and pulled off the goggles. Underneath her eyes were closed.
“Anton, stop.”
He stopped. He didn’t taste any blood in his mouth, which was good. His finger joint felt crushed. Anton wanted to wiggle it, to see how bad it was, but of course Jaka hadn’t given control of his body back to him, so he couldn’t.
When Jaka spoke again her voice was soft, almost affectionate. “You did a very brave thing, Solana. Look at me.”
“I can’t. Please.”
Jaka’s reply was a scream of pain, or at least what sounded like one. Solana’s eyelids flickered open just for a moment, and Jaka repeated “Look at me!” There was no softness in her voice anymore. Solana’s eyes met Jaka’s and froze there. She had lovely eyes, Anton thought, huge and dark.
“Solana, put—” Atmin began, but Jaka cut him off.
“Give me the goggles. Understand? You don’t need them. Isn’t it much nicer without them?”
The cyborg’s screen showed a man’s face, but Jaka noticed it first. “Don’t look at the cyborg. Ignore him. Only look at me. Toss those goggles over.”
“No,” said Pera. From one of the pockets of her suit she produced a pistol—a dino-scaled pistol with a muzzle as wide as Anton’s thumb. “Stop it.”
“She wants to do what I say. Don’t you, dear?”
Solana nodded. Her face had relaxed, and was now almost masklike in serenity. She looked at the goggles in her hand, then at Jaka, and tossed them down.
“See? Entirely voluntary. Not like poor Anton at all. She wants to do what I ask.”
“I said no.” Pera pointed the pistol at Jaka. “Give them back.”
“You shoot, you die,” said Adelmar, and tapped one of the missile pods on his suit with a finger.
“This is ridiculous,” said Yanai over everybody’s comm at once. “You, Jaka, there will be no fighting. Do what Pera says. If you attempt any violence against my crew I will destroy your shuttle and maroon you here.”
“Look at my shuttle and tell me what you see,” Jaka replied.
“The external cargo—oh,” said Yanai.
“Freelance rescue and salvage is a dangerous job,” said Jaka aloud to the room. “You never know what kind of people you’ll run into. My shuttle doesn’t have any weapon mounts, but a few years ago I got hold of a surplus plasma lance warhead. That’s mounted in the external cargo pod, and right now it’s pointing at your ship. I’ve set a deadman switch so that if anything happens to me it will fire. I’d also recommend against trying to tamper with it.”
“That’s just random noise,” said Pera. “I don’t believe you.”
“Test it, then. Fire that gun. You can probably kill me, then Adelmar will kill you, and your ship will be crippled. A Koenig Mark LXIX series 4 medium plasma lance warhead at point-blank range will cut your ship’s spine in half even if it doesn’t vaporize the main processor. I’m not sure what will happen after that. The shuttle might survive, and some of my team may get out alive, but your crew will spend half a century trapped in here on their way out to the Kuiper Belt. You’ll probably starve before you go crazy.”
“Yanai, we work for you. What orders do you give your crew?” asked Atmin.
“I’ve identified the device on the shuttle. She’s telling the truth. Pera, no shooting. Not now, at least. The rest of you, no fighting. Jaka, my crew are free agents. They listen to me only because I’m paying them. There are limits to what they will tolerate. And I’ve got a backup stored at Osorizan hab. Kill me and I just lose a few years of memory. So there are limits to what I will tolerate, even with your weapon aimed at my hull.”
“Naturally, naturally. Same for my people. We just want fairness.”
“Be specific. What do you want?”
“We want a fifty-fifty split of everything both teams find. Including whatever goodies your crew have already stashed somewhere. If you think about it, you guys actually come out ahead, since there’s six of us searching for stuff and only four of you. I think an even split is more than fair.”
“What about Solana?” asked Pera.
“I want her as insurance. You and the cyborg might decide to try ambushing my people one by one. Without those goggles she’s the only one of you I can really trust. I’ll give them back when it’s time for us to leave.”
The bird, the cyborg, and the dino went silent—presumably conferring by secure comm. Anton could see that neither the bird nor the dino were happy. Pera lashed her tail and scratched the floor with the big sickle claws on her feet. The bird fluttered about restlessly. The cyborg stood absolutely motionless. After several minutes the bird perched on the gallery railing near the top of the stairs.
“Reluctantly we do agree. Each team shall have an equal share of all the items found aboard. Before we leave this hab you will return Solana’s gear. Do you agree to all I say?”
“Sure! Like I said, all we want is a fair shake. This won’t cost you anything. Now that we’re all working together on the same team, I guess we shouldn’t waste any time. Let’s all get some rest so we can get started first thing in the morning!”
Anton’s finger joint throbbed all night, but he ignored it. He had slept through worse pain back in Fratecea, after his arrest. Once he had complained to a guard about conditions in the political prisoner dormitory. Fratecea had printers—the regime could provide mattresses to sleep on and something better than printed ration sticks to eat. It was perfectly logical to treat them well. The guard had looked at Anton with an expression of weariness and disappointment, then wordlessly struck him across the face with his baton. The blow had knocked Anton down, dislodged his left upper canine tooth, and fractured his cheekbone. The bone took weeks to heal, and still ached at times. He did not complain again.