The perspective was gut-wrenching. Shorty’s balls spun around three hundred meters or so below his line of travel with a velocity of about eighty or ninety meters per second along their outer edge – making their rotation about once every forty-five seconds. That was naked-eye fast, especially with those rockballs massing so many tons. In space naked-eye fast generally meant fatally fast. Like climbing into the Empire’s largest coffee grinder.
The cloud of junk moved too, traveling through The Necklace with Shorty’s Surprise, and swirling in some vague convection of gravitational pull and constant tiny collisions. It occurred to Albrecht to wonder why the orbiting crap didn’t just head out of the little system. Did they actually herd this stuff back into place?
The whole set-up was frightening.
The old ice cracking plant rotated with alarming velocity as well, though being at the core of the little dynamic system it didn’t have quite the gut-blurring effect of the tethered rockballs, not as far as Albrecht’s sense of well-being was concerned. A huge shaft rose out of the central core. The conning module from some long-vanished rock tug perched at the tip, gimbaled and counter-rotating to provide a modicum of sanity for the approaching traveler.
It was lit up, with “Do Not Enter” spelled out in seven alphabetic languages, two sets of ideograms, a script he didn’t recognize, and Imperial Standard Safety Glyphs. He presumed that was the entry. The shakedown point.
Albrecht landed the hardsuit outside a hatch about four meters wide by three tall – equipment lock, then, but not big enough for boats – immediately beneath the large, lit-up glyph panels. He looked around for a keypad to buzz in. Nothing. He considered calling on Shorty’s frequency, but given the enthusiasm with which his last call had been met, Albrecht wasn’t sure that game was worth the oxygen candle.
Surely they were watching him. As junky and weird as this set-up was, it was also a damned good fishtrap for wayward bandits – both a spacer and his vessel could fail to return from here quite easily. Most likely neither would ever be missed if they hadn’t logged a good flight plan somewhere.
He settled for powering his right glove to max output and pounding on the lock panels. If the intermediate chamber was under pressure, that ought to echo pretty well within. He felt sort of like the newt, hurling itself against the hatches of Jenny’s Little Pearl.
Then the doors slid back in a widening rhombus. He stepped forward into the light where three burly gentlemen in skinsuits awaited him.
‡
The shakedown wasn’t so bad. The gleesome threesome – close relatives, possibly clones or some such, and judging from their size and muscle development, engineered far past human norms of power and strength – popped the seals on his hardsuit. None too brutally they skinned Albrecht out of it, patted him down for blades, slugthrowers and energy weapons, impounded half his cash, and shoved him out the other side of the lock. The side with air pressure.
One of the monsters had trailed after him, proffering a receipt for the cash and the hardsuit. Albrecht took it. “Thanks.”
“Drink,” rumbled his minder. The man – Albrecht thought he was a man – had a voice which practically possessed its own plate tectonics. It matched his muscle grafts and subcutaneous armor.
Albrecht wasn’t sure if that was a question, a suggestion or an order, so he replied, “Lead the way.” It was a good bet that if he were looking for crew to hire, they’d be wherever the booze was.
The interior of Shorty’s Surprise was every bit as bizarre as the exterior. Whatever the central body had originally been, that had involved a series of tall pressure vessels. These were now in the fractional-g zone near the axis of rotation, something down around .1 or maybe even lower. The locals had taken advantage of the situation to intercut the old thick-walled cylinders with balconies, walkways, ladders, and every kind of dwelling or storage space human ingenuity could bring to bear out of a good-sized orbital scrap yard and a pressurized, low-gee environment. People walked, worked, laughed, screamed, fucked, flew all around Albrecht. The air smelled of a hundred scents, everything from the strange plastic odor of re-entry rated paint to good old-fashioned sweat to cooking with spices he couldn’t have named for a million credits but still made his mouth water.
And there were children everywhere. Scampering, climbing, leaping across open spaces like wriggling, wingless birds. Human enough – he didn’t see muties or any evidence of bione surgeries – and every shade of melanin in the gene pool, all mixed together in one extended, screaming mass woven in and around the mélange of commerce and architecture in which they lived.
Albrecht suddenly wondered why he’d never liked children. These people weren’t dregs, he realized. They were a breeding ground, hurtling across empty space toward some destination he couldn’t know, just as their children leaped unheeded into open air. He continued to muse as his minder led him along an intestinally complex path through several of the tall caverns, in and out of fogs of cuisine and different varieties of labor, before stopping in front of a storefront which appeared to be made of actual wood – that a luxury more rare than gemstones out in the Deep Dark, he knew.
“Here,” the big man rumbled.
“Thanks,” said Albrecht, and stepped inside.
Anybody who watched virteos knew what a belt miners’ bar looked like. Sort of a spacegoing version of The Newt Trap back at Gryphon Landing – grubby, crowded, filled with souvenirs and detritus of sweaty men and women laboring in honesty toil. This wasn’t any such thing. This was...a bubble of beauty inside the post-industrial chaos teeming around it.
Everything wall-like was also a wooden floor, arrayed in a rough dodecahedron. This close to the center of Shorty’s Surprise, there was no real sense of “down.” Brass rails served as rungs and handholds, and as Albrecht looked he realized the floor had been laid in long, thin sections secured with brass studs or nails.
It really was a work of art.
The bar proper was a smaller dodecahedron at the center of the room, connected by brass pipework positioned normal to the axis-of-spin. That would carry utility feeds, of course. The center dodecahedron had folding panels, so that it had been opened up in a sort of underlit latticework inside of which several people cooked, poured and otherwise tended bar.
The patrons were clustered around the outer rim of the room, hooked on to the ladders and railing, some using little portable tables to secure their drinks. A few people moved in groups of two or three in the open space between the englobing floor and the central bar – microgravity dancing, Albrecht realized.
“This is what you dream here, isn’t it,” he whispered.
“Dreams are good,” rumbled the minder, bursting into intelligible speech somewhat to Albrecht’s surprise. “Sit here by the wall. I’ll get drinks.”
Albrecht sat. He looked. He wondered what it meant to make a home in Shorty’s Surprise. Obviously people were born, lived and died here. It was a sort of fishtrap, all right, but a fishtrap for the future as much as for the past. Offense, not defense, for a culture Albrecht had never had much connection with.
It was the first place in the entire Halfsummer system where he’d felt welcome. Or at least comfortable.
The minder came back, two low-gee drink bulbs swinging from one paw. “Here.”
“Thank you,” said Albrecht. He looked it over. Unlabelled.
His host grinned, a somewhat alarming sight given the cracked ceramics that passed for teeth in his mouth. “Sugar water. You’ve got trouble coming, don’t need to be drunk.”
“Excuse me?”
“We watch the newsfeeds.” He leaned forward. “Carefully. And your boat. We know your boat. You got two kinds of problems chasing you, plus Ballbuster Bourne floating around out there somewhere keeping the box scores.”
“Then you know about the Writ of Attainder,” Albrecht said.
The minder shrugged.
“Who are the other guys?”
“Naval Oversight.”
Albrecht choked on his sugar water, spraying a cloud of the stuff. Spitting fluid in low gee was damned near a cardinal sin for a spacer, but his host just swatted it away. “They’re...they’re worse than the fucking Church...” Albrecht had urgent need of a head call, given how his gut had just begun gurgling.
“Two problems, no waiting.” The big man grinned again. “But maybe you’re the person to carry some problems away.”
“You guys allergic to Jenny D too? They didn’t like her much along the water docks back in Gryphon Landing.”
“You might say that.”
“Can I ask your name?”
The minder mulled that over for a moment. “Call me Dillon.”
“Thank you,” said Albrecht. “Look, Dillon. I just came here looking for crew, people that might want to ship out. Go claim Jenny D. from a cold orbit, if she’s still c-worthy, and leave. I didn’t expect to find a...a...city here.”
“No.” Dillon’s eyes narrowed. “Who does? We’re scum. Pirates. Fools. Ask anyone. The Empire, it’s for rich people who walk on dirt, fly between the stars in pretty plastic ships. We’re just who we are.”
“People.” Albrecht had never really thought about that, what it meant to be from a place like The Necklace. “Making, living, dying.” He stopped. “Killing, too.”
“Black Flag? That’s the anger of people like us. Striking a blow against the past. This...” One huge hand swept to include the bar, and possibly all of Shorty’s Surprise beyond. “This is the future of people like us. I hope you see the difference.” Dillon locked gazes with him. “You part of our anger, Micah Albrecht, or part of our future?”
Around them, the bar had fallen silent. Albrecht was aware of several dozen pairs of eyes watching him. This question was important. Whether he ever got back to Pearl, whether he ever found Jenny D, might hang on his answer. And how many of the people in here were Black Flag cell members? The minder had all but said Black Flag was powerful here.
It was Micah Albrecht who hung on the answer, he realized. Who he was, what he stood for.
“What am I signing up for?” he finally asked softly.
The answer was quick, brusque: “You tell me.” Testing.
He thought that over carefully. These people, hiding out here in the dark, they were building. Not destroying. The violent opportunism of the Black Flag hadn’t created this place. And Albrecht wasn’t a violent man either. “I...I’m not made for anger.”
“Fair enough. But mark this. Anger’s been made aplenty for you. There’s angry people following you out there. Black Flag has your name, too.”
“That’s as it may be. I just want to get on with life.”
“So you choose the future?”
Albrecht took a deep breath. “Yes.”
Dillon grinned, more broadly than before. “Good. In that case, allow me to show you the past.”
Everyone in the bar around them began moving with rapid, coordinated purpose.
‡
Golliwog: Halfsummer Solar Space, The Necklace, Shorty’s Surprise
“These people need to be exterminated,” Yee muttered on their suit band. “For the sake of public health and safety.”
Golliwog steered his own skinsuit toward the garish entrance. It was, he had to admit, so unlike the localspace environment around Powell Station that he wondered if this were a set-up. A graduation exercise. Surely no one could build such an improbable installation as Shorty’s Surprise? The architecture was bizarre, the maintenance nonexistent. Even the name was ridiculous.
And this fog of garbage and scrap and water ice. You could lose anything in it.
Including, he realized, fog. Golliwog suddenly wondered how much nanotrace there was around him. The glittering fog of high-end defensive tech would be utterly anonymous in this environment. Something had to be maintaining the cohesion of the junk cloud – most of it would have dispersed on its own, scattered by the angular momentum of this little system. The localspace cloud made rapid maneuvering challenging, too. He realized that this selfsame chaotic nonsense might in fact be quite a good defense. Especially if one was chronically underfunded and short on supplies.
He had to admit, they had a certain style.
As Yee reached the lock just ahead of him, one of the locals dropped down from the shadowed space behind the overlit glyphs. Yee pushed off from the decklip of the lock, putting space between her and the intruder. It took Golliwog a few precious seconds to realize what had set the doctor so suddenly in motion.
The local wasn’t wearing a suit.
He was a freak, too. Golliwog knew from freaks, given the circumstances of his own short life. This one was three meters tall, lanky as a sipping straw, with dead white skin, red body armor and a red cross tattooed on his forehead.
And apparently capable of standing around in hard vacuum. Not much frightened Golliwog, but that scared him.
Yee’s voice crackled in his helmet, tight, controlled, “Microthin skinsuit. Fucker’s showing off.”
The fear slumped through Golliwog’s guts, already turning into a hot ball of anger, when the red-and-white bastard spread sparkling gossamer wings and went after Dr. Yee.
Golliwog amped up his own systems, going into full offensive mode, and shot his skinsuit on an intercept course with the enemy’s most probable vector.
“Angel!” Yee shouted, starfishing her body to meet her attacker.
Angel? He wasn’t sure how Yee knew their opponent’s name, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that this Angel would have several precious seconds to tear at Yee before Golliwog could close.
But then, Dr. Yee was a Marine pathfinder.
Golliwog opened a carrier signal from the chips inside his head, to see if there were any Naval-grade nano spread around him. There was a flashing ripple in the fog, but he didn’t get the correct countersigns. His open weapons underneath his skinsuit, Golliwog snatched at likely-looking junk as he hurtled toward the combatants.
Angel came at Yee hands forward, wings wide, like red vengeance. Yee’s open-limbed posture let her fold around Angel’s left hand as soon as he caught her. Golliwog saw that blow land, saw the shock ripple through Yee’s skinsuit, but still she used Angel’s arm as a lever, twisting the hand and forearm against the natural range of motion of the elbow to give her control of his actions and effectively neutralize his advantage of velocity.
That move would have disabled any ordinary human who didn’t get free in time. Angel didn’t bother to twist free, but his arm didn’t break backward either. Yee simply ran out of range-of-travel, her body absorbing another shock as she stopped unexpectedly.
She held her grip on Angel’s wrist, though.
Golliwog closed then, his original course calculation being only a few percentage points in error. He swung the ice-covered strip of metal in his left hand, aiming through the gossamer wing toward the red-clad back, even as his right landed for a grip on Angel’s flank – in low-gee combat, a blow was close to meaningless if the combatant was not also anchored to the opponent’s body.
But the wing, almost illusory to the eye, slowed the swing of Golliwog’s right hand to a crawl, then a stop. He felt a fire in his nerves, followed by a frightening dullness, as both biological and enhanced circuits shorted out.
Golliwog’s right hand landed above Angel’s hip in that moment, and he converted his momentum to a sort of hug, trying to duck his head and upper torso beneath the sweep of the wings, aiming for the lower back.
Angel’s left leg folded upward in reverse – a skeletal impossibility in Golliwog’s considerable experience – sweeping a foot into the line of travel of his chest. Golliwog rolled close into this move, trying to take the blow on his side instead of his sternum, even as he heard Yee broadcast a startled grunt and saw a spray of icing blood gleaming in the light from the station’s glyphs.
The backward kick connected with a crack of Golliwog’s carbonmesh-reinforced ribs. But he was closed in now, close, hugging Angel’s right
leg with his deadening left arm. Golliwog flipped another metal strip into his right hand and stabbed upward into Angel’s groin. Between the legs, he saw Yee land a two-legged kick on Angel’s face.
Someone short and chubby in a skinsuit and softbubble helmet swam across Golliwog’s line of site, arms waving madly. Angel went limp, releasing Yee. Golliwog took that moment to drive his metal into the groin one more time – no one had released him. Even as the blow landed, Yee’s voice crackled in his helmet, wavering and shrill as he’d ever heard it: “Stand down, Golliwog.”
Despite the order, Golliwog held his follow-through, making sure Angel felt it. No point in breaking his training now. Was that rebellion or loyalty? Crimson ice trailed from Yee’s suit, punctuation to both emotions.
‡
Menard: Halfsummer Solar Space, The Necklace, Shorty’s Surprise
“By the bones of Saint Tikhon!” Menard shouted. This was a disaster. The blesséd angel had started a fight it couldn’t finish. That alone was astonishing.
Who were these people?
The three combatants circled warily. The smaller of the two strange fighters was in a bad way, he could see, but there was something wrong with the angel as well. The...wide...stranger seemed to have trouble controlling his movements.
The Chor Episcopos took a deep breath, prayed for wisdom, then spread his arms wide. The cross stenciled on the breast of his skinsuit should make his status clear enough. That they had stopped fighting told him these newcomers weren’t Black Flag or random criminals – those sorts wouldn’t have bothered to break off until they’d prevailed or been thoroughly beaten. Which in space tended to be an especially final result.
The particulate fog around him glittered in a new pattern, flashing light and dark as if something invisible rippled through it. He didn’t know what that activity meant, but it didn’t seem good. Progressing with deliberate movements borne of both caution and clumsiness – he was suit-trained and vacuum-rated, but Menard would never have expert’s comfort in microgravity – he made his way to the huge airlock.