Stolen Earth, page 4
Morales started coughing and sputtering and Bishop began swallowing rapidly against the rising bile. Lynch hid his reaction well, but Rajani could just make out the tightening around his lips and the clenching of his jaw muscles.
Federov, however, drew a deep and exaggerated breath. “Smells like home,” he said with a grin.
“Let’s go,” Lynch said. He put action to the words, first hitting the controls of the loader sled they’d acquired from the KSC ship. Rajani forced herself to take a few more breaths, trying, and failing, to acclimate herself. Then she gave up and followed the others.
As soon as they were off the Arcus with a single palette of scrubbers in tow, Lynch sent the signal back to the ship. The cargo ramp lifted behind them and she heard the faint sounds of the vessel locking down. She hated this part of any job, the part where they all waited to see if their employer would betray them. Locking the ship wouldn’t do any good if the nomads aboard R292-A decided it would be easier to shoot them than pay them. If word spread, no one else would risk dealing with them and R292-A would be finished as a station. But that would be little consolation to the crew of the Arcus.
A dozen people waited a respectful distance from the ramp. Most of them were armed, some with boarding shotguns, others with simple truncheons. Every hip held a pistol or combat knife. The dangers of the Fringe went both ways.
One of them pushed their way to the front. Like everyone she saw before her—and most people she’d seen since walking away from her old life—they were thin, almost to the point of emaciation. They wore a ship suit, its model not dissimilar from the one Rajani wore, save for the mismatched patches. Tears happened; Rajani had torn her own suit twice already, but those had repaired themselves, using the nanite technology that was standard. How old and hard-used did a suit have to be before you needed to use actual patches?
“Captain,” the person rasped, offering a gloved hand. Lynch took it without comment. “Welcome aboard.” The speaker’s eyes darted from the single palette of scrubbers to the ship’s hold and back again. “This can’t be it, can it?”
“We’ve got more,” Lynch said. He reached into one of the containers and pulled out the CO2 scrubber. It was a simple rectangle, banded in composites wrapped around a filter created using solid-state amines. When activated, they worked by binding excess carbon dioxide in an atmosphere. They were inexpensive, easy enough to manufacture, and even with Old Earth’s resources closed to SolComm, there was more than enough raw materials available from asteroids, moons, and the gas giants to ensure an effectively unlimited supply.
They were only one weapon in the arsenal available to SolComm for carbon dioxide scrubbing. Hydroponics provided a natural scrubber but required more space. Advanced habitats leveraged nanite-based carbon-dioxide-removal technology that operated more efficiently. But for nomads like those aboard R292-A, the old-fashioned amine-based scrubbers were vital to their survival.
Which, in turn, meant that they were heavily regulated by SolComm. Fringe stations were tolerated because, no matter how poorly they wore the yoke of the Commonwealth, they still provided goods and services that were needed. And, more importantly, while their residences might balk at it, taxes were still paid. SCBI and SolCommNav might not stray too far from SolComm’s heart, but if the Bureau of Revenue could find you, they would always come knocking.
But they couldn’t find the nomads. So, to ensure that all taxes were properly paid, SolComm had come up with the brilliant idea of making it impossible to get life-saving technology without going through the proper channels. Rajani glanced at her crewmates. Or, very improper ones.
Lynch had handed over the scrubber for inspection. The person who had stepped forward passed it to one of their waiting attendants who promptly dropped to the deck and broke out what looked to Rajani like a grade-school chemistry kit, the kind of thing that would be considered a toy in SolComm proper.
“Trouble with counterfeits?” Lynch asked conversationally as he watched the “chemist” work.
“Yes,” the spokesperson said. “It’s a hard life out here. Everyone tries to take advantage. Name’s Casey, by the way.”
“Lynch. And Federov, Morales, Bishop, and Hayer,” he said, indicating each of them in turn. “That’s the real thing, Casey,” he added. “Lifted from the target your people provided us.”
“I’m sure it is. But you can’t be too careful.”
“Fair enough.”
The chemist was back on her feet. “Looks good, Casey,” she said. She didn’t sound particularly happy. The others stiffened; Federov and Morales none too subtly moved their hands closer to their weapons. The tension stood there for a moment before Casey raised a mollifying hand.
“We aren’t going to hurt you,” they said.
“Truer words,” Federov muttered. The big mercenary still made Rajani nervous sometimes, but when things went sideways—and they did more often than any of them would like—she was happy to have him on her side.
“Captain,” Casey replied, ignoring Federov, “we can’t pay you. Worse, we knew when we sent out the message that we couldn’t pay you. But we need those scrubbers. We need them bad. Bad enough that some of us were in favor of just taking them, like you took them from SolComm.”
“Hell of a time to be playing for moral equivalency,” Lynch said. He was smiling, a smile that Rajani found distinctly unsettling. Why had she not wanted to carry a weapon?
Casey offered a smile of their own. “Fair enough. We can purchase two palettes at the price agreed, and we will. And if that’s the end of our business, so be it. But before I do that, I’d like to show you around. You and whoever of your crew want to come.”
“Price of two palettes is barely going to cover the fuel for this, Cap,” Bishop said. He was frowning at the crew of R292-A. But he also sounded troubled.
“Understood. Morales, Federov, Hayer: back to the ship. Make sure we’re prepared for any… eventualities. Bishop, you’re with me.”
“Uh, Cap… I didn’t…”
Without a word, Federov unstrapped his gun belt and tossed it, complete with holstered sidearm, to the mechanic. “I have plenty more where that came from,” the big mercenary grinned. “We’ll make sure there is warm welcome for you and Captain when you return.”
GRAY
Casey led them out of the docking bay and into the ship proper. The corridors were narrow, forcing them to walk in single file, but Gray could feel Bishop’s presence at his back. Federov would have been a better choice for capacity for violence; Morales, new though she was, undoubtedly knew more about the potential for ambushes and betrayals in the steel alleyways of a ship or station; Hayer… well, this wasn’t really Hayer’s type of show. She’d be better off ensconced in the Arcus infiltrating R292-A’s systems and guaranteeing them an open exit should the need arise. Bishop, on the other hand, wasn’t his best fighter and had no special knowledge of station security. But Gray had chosen him anyway.
What Bishop had was a moral compass on which Gray had come to rely.
His own pragmatism skewed him to doing whatever it took to survive. Life in SolComm only reinforced that idea; you kept your head down, followed your orders, and didn’t rock the boat. In return, the calorie rations flowed, and you never had to worry about having enough air to breathe or water to drink.
So long as you kept toeing the party line.
And exhibited a willingness to put down those who didn’t.
It was that last little catch that had ended his naval career. The rebellion on Themis was supposed to have been a few radicals who had seized control of the environmental regulation system. They’d threatened to cut it off and let the inhabitants die a slow death of asphyxiation unless their conditions were met. Not, Gray thought, unlike the fate that was facing the inhabitants of R292-A.
He’d drawn the mission. His intelligence brief had been clear: Themis was already dead. The terrorists had executed their plan and disabled the environmental systems, and no response force could get there soon enough to do a damn thing about it. But the perpetrators were in the process of looting Themis before making their escape. The mission parameters had been simple: destroy the station and the terrorists with it.
He’d executed his orders. He’d been in the command chair when Themis had been destroyed. But something about the attack run had never sat right with him; their sensors—military grade, far outstripping those aboard the Arcus—had been completely blinded, almost as if they had been disabled, despite the readouts that clearly said otherwise. But he’d had his orders, and no time to second-guess what his ship’s eyes and ears were telling them.
He’d done the job.
Even now, his guts twisted at the memory and his palms grew clammy. He hadn’t been able to ignore the worrying fingers of doubt scratching at his psyche. He’d followed orders, but he’d questioned their provenance. So, he’d started searching.
It took two years to uncover the truth, and when he found it, Gray’s worldview shattered. Themis station hadn’t been the target of a terrorist attack, it had been the target of a political one. The SolComm government had authorized action against Themis for the express purpose of eliminating a burgeoning activist group that had dared to question the policies and paradigms of the Commonwealth. The group had committed no crimes beyond speaking out against the government under which they lived. But their numbers included some of the station elite, lending weight to their disaffection that distinguished it from the rumblings of the “common rabble”.
That had been enough. The simple rebellion, not of action, but of thought and idea, had been enough to doom them. A narrative had been crafted; orders had been cut. And just like that, Gray had become the cat’s-paw that facilitated the deaths of close to a thousand civilians. Even now, years later, he could feel the boiling anger at being used to commit mass murder. The near-nauseating sense of betrayal. And all because he had followed orders.
He had thought about taking his story to the public. But the popular press was little more than another wing of the SolComm government, a propaganda machine designed to keep the people firmly on the side of the Commonwealth. Who could he tell? He could add his voice to those of the conspiracy theorists that shouted into the void of the net and were laughed down by all “serious and right-thinking people” at least until his identity was discovered. At that point, the best he could hope for was the end of his career. The worst was a quick trial and efficient execution.
It had taken one look at the coverage of the official story to quell any ideas of that sort of martyrdom. The state-controlled media outlets parroted the line that there had been a “horrendous attack” by terrorists on the “sovereignty of the Commonwealth.” Dissenting narratives would not be tolerated. That had been Gray’s moment, the instant he was done with SolCommNav and as done with the Commonwealth as he could be.
But his belief in himself was also shaken. He’d followed orders when he’d destroyed Themis, despite the warning signs. He didn’t want to make the same mistake twice, and he trusted Bishop over any of the others to speak up when he thought something was morally wrong.
As they followed Casey, Gray saw plenty of evidence of “wrong” in the suffering around them. The few people they passed looked much like settlement’s spokesperson, thin to the point of starvation and many with the glassy eyes and shortness of breath that spoke of mild oxygen deprivation. Through open hatches he saw storage compartments converted to living and communal spaces, packed tight with crude palettes laid side by side, crowded even by SolComm standards. The people in those compartments all stared back at him with the same quiet desperation. It was the look of a people who knew they were close to the end but had run out of ideas on what to do about it. Their eyes followed the little procession of Casey, Gray, and Bishop, and in a few, he saw the faintest glimmer of hope.
Damn.
“Just a little bit farther,” Casey said.
“Yeah,” Bishop muttered under his breath. “I’m sure you have to take us by some starving orphans or something first.”
Casey offered a wan grin. “Something like that, I’m afraid, Mr. Bishop. I have an offer to make you, but I’ll be honest—it’s not a great one. So, yes, I’m trying to appeal somewhat to your sense of what’s right. Please humor me a little longer.”
Gray raised an eyebrow at that. Casey’s admission was almost refreshing; normally, people who were trying to manipulate you weren’t quite so outspoken about the fact. Neither Gray nor Bishop spoke as they continued the grim march through the ship-turned-nomadic-hamlet. They passed more compartments packed to the vents with people, but they passed other spaces as well. Common areas where there was at least some relief from the unrelenting gray, places where they heard the faint trickle of laughter, and functional areas of the ship, where crew went about the myriad tasks that kept R292-A flying.
They ended at the ship’s infirmary and it was every bit as depressing as Bishop feared. It wasn’t starving children that greeted them; it was the dead.
“I’m sorry to show you this,” Casey told them, “but I want you to understand just how dire our situation is.”
They were laid out in neat rows, at least a score of them. They had been stripped of their clothing—in a place like R292-A no resources, however minor, could be wasted on the dead—and covered with simple sheets pulled up to their chins. The dead were all older than most of the ship’s inhabitants they’d seen so far. The sheets hung oddly on the frames beneath, evidence of the spinal degeneration that came from decades of living in conditions where the artificial gravity could go through wild fluctuations. Gray was no stranger to death, but after a moment he had to avert his eyes. These people didn’t have to die.
“The deaths are just starting,” Casey said. “These are some of our most vulnerable, all lost in the past week. We’ve decided to hold the ceremonies until the end of the month, because we know there will be more.” They glanced over at Bishop and Gray. “The two palettes of scrubbers we can afford will buy us some time. But they won’t be enough to find a real alternative.”
Gray looked at the bodies and wondered if Casey was being entirely honest with them. Had the nomads really decided to hold off committing their dead because they knew that more funerals would be forthcoming? Or had they delayed to add more emotional punch to whatever pitch the spokesperson was about to give them? It was macabre, maybe even underhanded, but if the lives of his crew were on the line, was there anything he wouldn’t do?
Bishop cleared his throat. “Um… you said something about a proposal? Maybe we could discuss it somewhere else?”
* * *
“Captain, this is crazy!”
Bishop wasn’t wrong about Casey’s proposal. The three of them were squeezed into Casey’s “office”: a compartment so small that the desk was pushed hard against the bulkhead. They’d need to get a new one if ever the calorie ration on R292-A increased.
“Let me get this straight,” Gray said. “You expect us to give you the full cargo of scrubbers in exchange for an introduction. An introduction to a person you claim is looking for a crew just like ours to infiltrate Old Earth? Which, let’s not forget, is tantamount to a suicide mission.” He shook his head. “You’re not making this easy, are you?”
Casey offered another tired smile. “Captain Lynch, if we wanted easy, we all would have stayed in SolComm’s good books. We’ve all chosen for various reasons to pursue freedom; freedom is a high-risk, high-reward sort of endeavor.”
“True enough,” Gray agreed. “But in this case, I’m not sure what risk it is you’re taking, exactly. I see the risk your contact is taking—you could just as easily turn them in to SolComm for a reward as point us in their direction. I see the risk we’d be taking, both in the possibility that you’re setting us up, and in the risk of violating the IZ if we were ever actually to undertake such a mission. But you seem to be getting all benefit, no risk.”
“You could turn and leave now, taking your cargo with you, and every soul aboard this ship will die,” Casey said, voice suddenly flat. “I’m not sure there is a bigger risk any of us could take.”
“They’ve got a point, there, Captain. Since they let the others back aboard the Arcus they can’t even guarantee seizing the scrubbers. Lord knows, Federov would put up a fight. Morales, too. And I don’t think even the good Lord knows what Hayer might have done to their poor computers by now.” That brought a concerned flash across Casey’s face, which was enough to bring a grin to Gray’s own. Trust Bishop to remind them—both of them—that the Arcus and her crew were still capable of putting up a fight.
“Okay,” he acknowledged. “Say we go for this. You get the cargo. We get the credits for the two palettes you can afford and… what? A name?”
“More than that, Captain,” Casey assured him. “A location, and an introduction. Given the sensitivity of the job, you couldn’t very well walk in there with just a name. We make certain contacts on our end so that the… employer is expecting you. We certify your bona fides. Act as a reference, I suppose you could say. And the job pays well, as I said.”
“Why you?” Bishop asked. “No offense, or nothing, but you don’t seem the type to be hobnobbing with folks who have those kind of credits.”
“Because, Mr. Bishop, it was a crew from this ship that made the last attempt. We were hoping to make enough credits to finally bring some prosperity to this ship. We sent the best crew we could put together on one of only two smaller vessels that we have.”
