backwash as they left to pursue the beacon, leaving the pirate captain and the two stationers.
The pirate captain pointed his weapon at the woman and spoke to the man. “Get moving.”
The stationer stiffened for a moment, but he didn’t have the fight in him, and in a matter of moments, he was carrying crates to Zero’s ship, shoulders slumped. Zero watched, unmoving, as the events took on a rhythm and momentum all their own. The fact was that without constant stimulus, the human mind simply could not maintain any meaningful state of aggressive vigilance, and by the time the stationer had made a few trips, the captain had lost his edge, his weapon no longer pointed at his hostage, but rather in her general direction.
Zero wouldn’t get a better chance, and he instructed his suit to pump him full of stims the next time the stationer disappeared through the airlock. Had he been thinking he would have hesitated, and died. Instead, he found his legs under him and hunched forward in a sprint that pitted gravity against his legs’ ability to keep him off the ground. He ran in a wide arc to avoid the crates and the long jump over them that would have made him an easy target. The pirate had turned halfway to face him by the time he had covered the twenty meters that separated them and Zero caught him under the ribs with his shoulder, his momentum carrying both of them to the ground, the pirate’s gun clattering across the decking.
The pirate lashed out, catching Zero across the nose with an elbow. His eyes welled up with tears, and he reached down to where the pirates head had been, to find only air. Another blow, this time to the back of the head, and Zero was down.
Horizon Station
+03:51:49
Zero’s return to consciousness was accompanied by a renewed headache, cord cutting into his wrists, and a flashing red tile announcing that his AR system was unable to find anything to pair with. He told his AR to pump painkillers, but it refused, telling him that his body couldn’t handle any more modifiers. He opened his eyes, letting the station’s harsh light in to sear his retinas.
“He’s back,” a woman’s voice said.
“The pirates–” he began.
“Are gone,” a second woman said, one of the stationers. “They took your ship.”
“Then why am I tied up?”
“You ghosted your way to our station, hacked the doors, and boarded, weapons drawn,” the first woman said. “What do you expect?”
“Fair enough, but you have to understand–”
“We don’t have to understand anything.” The second woman, the stationer from the cargo bay leaned forward so that she was looking down into his eyes. “Anything you want us to understand, you had better help with. You can start with who you are and why you’re here.” Some of her hair fell forward, and she had to brush it out of her eyes. In different circumstances, he would have thought that she was coming on to him, but her face made it clear that she wouldn’t have any regrets if she had to throw him out the airlock to protect herself and her friends.
“My name is Zero, I work for the Syndicated Merchants Guild. Your station was flagged as a potential hub for unregulated trade.”
The woman turned to look at her compatriot, who nodded. Apparently his credentials had checked out.
“Unless you count getting robbed, we don’t fit the bill.” The woman eased back as she talked, and Zero relaxed with the knowledge that he probably wasn’t going to die.
“I can see that, so if you want to get a commpod off, the Guild will come and pick me up,” he said.
“Remi, how soon can you get word off?”
“I can have the software ready in a few minutes, but I’ll have to ask Vance about the hardware. Maybe by end of shift,” Remi said.
“That’ll have to do, I suppose,” the first woman said.
“Thank you,” Remi said, and left.
“Thanks . . .” he began.
“Ava,” she said.
“Thank you, Ava.”
Horizon Station, Main Cargo Bay
+11:29:11
The end of shift estimate for the commpod proved to be unrealistic, and Zero found himself once again in the cargo bay helping Vance get it up and running. What needed to be done was pretty straightforward, but unfortunately straightforward was not the same thing as quick, and so Zero had to hold wires and boards for several hundred solders.
The two of them worked in near silence for the better part of an hour, talking only when necessary, before Vance broke the silence. “Do you think the pirates will come back?” he asked.
“No, not any time soon,” Zero said. “It will take them a while to catch up to the beacon, and by then they will be far enough away that you will be more trouble than you’re worth.”
“After they didn’t kill us, I was thinking that it was only a matter of time before they came back.”
“No offense, but you aren’t a threat to them,” Zero said. “There was no advantage to killing you.” Zero didn’t add that the pirates might need something from this station in the future, and if Vance and his friends survived, there would be something to take.
The tension went out of Vance’s shoulders and his face softened as some of the weight of concern left him.
“So what’s it like, working for the Guild?” Vance asked.
Zero paused. “OK, I guess. Certainly not as glamorous as in the Sims, but OK,” Zero said.
“But what is it like? Are most places like this?” Vance asked, gesturing above his head to the column that ran through the center of the station to the clear dome on top.
“No, not at all,” Zero said. “The system is pretty good, most places that we go we find exactly what we are looking for, illegal manufacturing or trade, and if not that, then at least evidence of the place being used as a waypoint for smugglers. This is a first for me.”
“And the other companies, do things ever get rough with them?” Vance asked.
“No, there aren’t many contract disputes these days, and of those, few turn violent.”
They finished soldering a section of the pod and had to flip it over. It was about four meters long and a meter in diameter, but was fortunately very light, comprised of nothing but an engine and some basic hardware for navigation and communications strapped to a large fuel tank. With the tank empty, it was more awkward than heavy.
“How about here? How is it living on Horizon?” Zero asked as they began to solder again.
“It’s not easy, but it’s good, better than Habitat at least,” Vance said. “I don’t miss the bowels of that station.”
Zero agreed, he had been to some of the larger stations. From the outside, they were beautiful, the gardens that covered their exteriors causing them to glitter like giant emeralds scattered among the stars. From the inside it was a different matter all together, with the vast majority unable to afford to visit, much less live on, the gilded shell. Instead, most lived in what was best described as a giant metal hive, filled with people and machinery, all buzzing along to the hum of commerce.
The two of them worked in silence after that, assembling the sheaths of the pod’s systems. They were nearly done when Remi’s voice came through the handheld clipped to Vance’s belt.
“You two up for some food?” she asked.
Vance reached down to touch a button. “We’ll be right up.”
Zero didn’t want to stop working, but knew that an hour or two wouldn’t make much of a difference either way. He followed Vance, climbing the stairs that spiraled up the station’s central column.
Two decks up they reached the dining room. The tall floor-to-ceiling translucent panels provided a panoramic view of the void as the station rotated on it’s long axis. But it wasn’t the view that caught Zero’s eyes, it was the food. The food that the pirates had taken had been Chalk, long storage rations named for its taste. It would keep you alive, but you might want to kill yourself. What was arrayed on the table, on the other hand, looked like the food in the adverts, colorful and textured. He wondered what sort of resources they had, if they were able to ma
nufacture elaborate meals while disconnected from any sort of supply network.
Remi arrived as Ava was bringing the last of the food out from the kitchen, and they all sat down around the table and said ritual words of thanks. Zero had no idea what was what, and it all looked great, so he just took some of everything. He took a bite.
It was delicious.
“What is this? Where do you get it?” he asked.
Remi looked him in the eye and answered, “There used to be five of us . . .”
Zero just stared at her for a moment, his fork held halfway between his plate and his mouth. Then Ava and Vance swallowed enough of their food to avoid choking when they burst into laughter, their faces turning red, and the table rattling as they pounded their fists on it.
“We’ll show you later,” Ava said.
They all ate, and Zero ate until he was full, then ate some more, ending up with an empty plate and an aching stomach. Remi excused herself first, then Vance.
“Come on, I want to show you something,” Ava said after they had cleared the table.
“Sure, what is it?” he asked.
“Follow me, I’ll show you,” she said as she led him back to the stairs at the central column.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked.
“The same thing we were doing before, why?” Ava said.
“Even if it was just chalk, the pirates took a lot of food, how are you going to get more?” he asked.
“You’ll see.”
The stairs led them to an open area bigger even than the cargo bay. After he had caught his