Which meant it was probably time to change it, Adam thought as he eased his oversized frame into the taxi, which drove him to the Westpool Hotel. He checked in and paid for two weeks in advance. His room was a double on the eighth floor, with sealed windows and air conditioning set too cold for him. He hated that, he was a light sleeper and the noise from the air conditioning would keep him awake for hours. It always did.
He unpacked all the clothes in his suitcase, then took out the smaller shoulder bag containing his emergency pack – two sets of clothing, one of which was several sizes too small, a medical kit, cash, a CST return ticket from EdenBurg to Velaines with the outbound section already used, a couple of very sophisticated handheld arrays containing some well-guarded kaos software, and a legal ion stun pistol with buried augmentation which gave it a lethal short-range blast.
An hour later, Adam left the hotel and walked five blocks in the warm afternoon sunlight, getting a feel of the capital city. Traffic up and down the wide roads was close-spaced, with taxis and commercial vans dominating the lanes. None of them used combustion engines, he noted, they were all powered by superconductor batteries. This section of town was still respectable, close to the central financial and commercial districts, although fifteen blocks away the quality of the buildings deteriorated appreciably. Around him now were stores and offices, along with some small side roads of terraced apartments, none of them over four or five stories high. Public buildings built in a late imperial Russian style fronted neat squares. In the distance, down the perfectly straight roads, were the towers that marked the heart of the city. Every few blocks he walked under the elevated rail tracks snaking through the city’s road grid, thick concrete arteries on high stanchions, carrying the major lines in and out of the planetary station.
Velaines was in phase one space, barely fifty light-years from Earth itself. Opened for settlement in 2090, its economy and industry had matured along model lines ever since. It now had a population of over two billion with a proportionally high standard of living, the kind of world which phase two and three space planets aspired to become. Given the length of its history, it was inevitable that some strands of decay should creep into its society. In the fast-paced capital market economy model that Velaines followed, not everybody could make themselves rich enough to enjoy multiple rejuvenations. The areas they lived in reflected their financial status, road surfaces were cracked and uneven, while the efficient citywide network of metro trams serving them had fewer than average stops and ran old carriages. This was where the real rot set in, the despair and dead ends, where human lives were wasted, sacrificed to the god of economics. In this day and age it was an outrage that such a thing should happen. It was exactly the environment Adam had long ago committed himself to eradicating, and now the place he needed most for his other activities.
He found himself an A+A hotel at the end of 53rd Street, and checked in, using his Quentin Kelleher identity. The A+A was a franchise of cheap fully-automated hotels where the manager was also the maintenance chief. The reception array accepted the Augusta dollar account transfer from his credit tattoo, and gave him a code for room 421. Its layout was a simple square three metres on a side, with a shower/toilet alcove and a dispenser outlet. There was one jellmattress bed, one chair, and one retractable shelf. However, the room was on the corner of the building, which meant he had two windows.
He asked the dispenser’s small array for a sleeping pouch, three packaged meals, two litres of bottled water, and a toiletries bag, all charged to his account. The mechanism whirred smoothly a minute later, and the items popped out into the rack. After that he set one of his handheld arrays to sentry mode, and left it scanning the room. If anyone did break in, it would notify his e-butler immediately with an encrypted message from a one-time unisphere address. Such an act had a low probability. Velaines was proud of its relatively low crime-index, and anyone staying in an A+A wouldn’t have anything of value. Good enough odds for him.
*
That evening Adam took a metro tram across town to another slightly shabby district. In amongst the closed shops and open bars he found a door with a small sign above it:
Intersolar Socialist Party
Velaines, 7th chapter
His e-butler gave the door his Huw North party member-ship code, and the lock buzzed. Inside was pretty much what he expected, a flight of bare wooden stairs leading up to a couple of rooms with high windows, long since boarded up. There was a bar in one, serving cheap beer from microbreweries, and lethal-looking liquors from ceramic bottles. A games portal took up most of the second room, with observer chairs packed round the walls.
Several men were sitting on stools at the bar. They fell silent as Adam walked over. Nobody wearing a suit, even as cheap as his, belonged in that room.
‘Beer, please,’ Adam told the barman. He put a couple of Earth dollar bills on the counter; the currency was accepted without question on most worlds.
The bottle was placed in front of him. Everybody watched as he took a sip. ‘Not bad.’ Adam even managed to keep a straight face. He could appreciate a Socialist club not buying from a big corporate brewery, but surely they could find a smaller one which actually produced drinkable beer.
‘New in town, comrade?’ the barman asked.
‘Got in today.’
‘Staying long?’
‘A little while, yeah. I’m looking for a comrade called Murphy, Nigel Murphy.’
The man at the far end of the bar stood up. ‘That’ll be me then.’ He was slim, taller than Adam, with a narrow face that carried suspicion easily. Adam guessed he was a first-life; his head was almost bald, with just a thin monk’s ring of greying hair. His clothes were those of an ordinary working man: jeans, and a check shirt, with a fleece jacket worn open, a woolly hat stuffed into one pocket. They were all streaked with dirt, as if he’d come straight from the factory or yard. But the way he looked at Adam, the assessment he carried out in a glance, marked him out as a leader.
‘Huw North,’ Adam said as they shook hands. ‘One of my colleagues was here last week.’
‘Not sure if I remember,’ Nigel Murphy said.
‘He said you were the man to talk to.’
‘Depends what you want to talk about . . . comrade.’
Adam held in a sigh. He’d been through this same ritual so many times over the years. By now he really ought to have worked out how to circumvent the bullshit and get right down to business. But as always, it had to be played out. The local man had to be proved top dog in front of his friends.
‘I have a few issues,’ Adam said. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’
‘You’re very free with your money there, comrade,’ said one of the others sitting behind Nigel Murphy. ‘Got a lot of it, have you? Thinking you can buy our friendship?’
Adam smiled thinly at the barfly. ‘I don’t want your friendship, and you certainly don’t want to be a friend of mine.’
The man grinned round his colleagues, his appearance was mid-thirties, with the kind of rashness which suggested that was his genuine age, a first-lifer. ‘Why’s that?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Sabbah. What’s it to you?’
‘Well, Sabbah. If you were my friend, you’d be stalked across the Commonwealth, and when they catch you, you’ll die. Permanently.’
Nobody in the bar was smiling any more. Adam was glad of the small heavy bulge in his jacket produced by the ion pistol.
‘Any of you remember November 21st 2344?’ Adam looked round challengingly.
‘Abadan station,’ Nigel Murphy said quietly.
‘That was you?’ Sabbah asked.
‘Let’s just say I was in the region at the time.’
‘Four hundred and eighty people killed,’ Murphy said. ‘A third of them total deaths. Children who were too young to have memorycell inserts.’
‘The train was late,’ Adam said. His throat was dry as he remembered the events. They were still terribly clear. He’d neve
r had a memory edit, never taken the easy way out. Live with the consequences of your actions. So every night he dreamed of the explosion and derailment just in front of the gateway, carriages plunging across junctions and parallel rails in the busiest section of the station. Fifteen trains hit, side-shunted, crashing, bursting apart, exploding, spewing out radioactive elements. And bodies. ‘It was on the wrong section of track at the wrong time. My chapter was after the Kilburn grain train.’
‘You wanted to stop people from eating?’ Sabbah asked sneeringly.
‘Is this a drinking den or a Socialist chapter? Don’t you know anything about the party you support? The reason we exist? There are certain types of grain trains which are specially designed to go through zero-end gateways. CST don’t tell people about those trains, same way as they don’t mention zero-end. The company spent millions designing wagons which can function in freefall and a vacuum. Millions of dollars developing machinery whose only job is to dump their contents into space. They go through a zero-end gateway onto a line of track that’s just hanging there in the middle of interstellar space. Nobody knows where. It doesn’t matter, they exist so that we can safely dump anything harmful away from H-congruous planets. So they send the trains with their special wagons through and open the hatches to expel their contents. Except there’s nothing physically dangerous about the grain. It’s just tens of thousands of tons of perfectly good grain streaming out into the void. There’s another clever mechanism built into the wagons to make sure of that. Just opening the hatch isn’t good enough. In freefall the grain will simply sit there, it has to be physically pushed out. And do you know why they do it?’
‘The market,’ Nigel Murphy said with a hint of weariness.
‘Damn right: the market. If there’s ever a glut of food, the prices go down. Commodity traders can’t have that, they can’t sell at enough profit to pay for the gamble they’ve made on the work of others, so the market demands less food to go around. The grain trains roll through the zero-end gateways, and people pay higher prices for basic food. Any society which allows that to happen is fundamentally wrong. And grain is just the tiniest part of the abuse people are subject to thanks to the capitalist market economy.’ Adam stared hard at Sabbah, knowing that once again he was going too far, making too much of an issue out of his own commitment. He didn’t care; this was what he’d devoted himself to, even now with all his other priorities, the greater human cause still fuelled him. ‘That’s why I joined this party, to end that kind of monstrous injustice. That’s why I’ve committed my life to this party. And that’s why I’ll die, a total death, a member of this party. Because I believe the human race deserves better than those bastard plutocrats running us like some private fiefdom. How about you, sonny? What do you believe in?’
‘Thanks for clearing that up,’ Nigel Murphy said hurriedly. He stood between Adam and Sabbah. ‘All of us here are good members of the party, Huw. We might have joined for different reasons, but we have the same aims.’ With one hand he signalled Sabbah and the others to stay at the bar. His other arm pressed lightly on Adam’s shoulder, steering him towards a small door. ‘Let’s talk.’
The back room was used to store beer crates and all the other junk which a bar generates down the years. A single poly-photo strip was fixed to the ceiling, providing illumination. When the door was closed, Adam’s e-butler informed him its access to the cybersphere had been severed.
‘Sorry about that,’ Nigel Murphy said as they pulled out a couple of empty beer crates to sit on. ‘The comrades aren’t used to new faces round here.’
‘You mean the party’s a lost cause on Velaines?’
Nigel Murphy nodded reluctantly. ‘It seems that way some days. We barely scrape two per cent in elections now, and a lot of those are simply protest votes against the major parties. Any direct action we take against the companies is so . . . I don’t know. Puerile? It’s like we’re hitting a planet with a rubber hammer, we’re not causing any damage. And there’s always the risk of another mistake like Abadan. Socialism isn’t about killing people, after all. It’s supposed to be about justice.’
‘I know. It’s hard, believe me. And I’ve been working for the cause a lot longer than you. But you have to believe that some day all this will change. The Commonwealth today is based on pure imperialist expansion. That’s always the most favourable time for market economics because there are always new markets opening. But it will ultimately fail. The expansion into phase three space is nothing like as fast and aggressive as the first and second phases were. The whole process is slowing. Eventually this madness will stop and we can start to focus our resources towards genuine social growth instead of physical.’
‘Let’s hope so.’ Nigel Murphy raised his beer bottle. ‘So what can I do for you?’
‘I need to speak to some people. I’m looking to buy weapons hardware.’
‘Still blowing up grain trains, huh?’
‘Yeah.’ Adam forced a smile. ‘Still blowing up grain trains. Can you set that up for me?’
‘I can try. I’ve bought a few small pieces myself over the years.’
‘I’m not looking for small pieces.’
‘The dealer I use, she should be able to help. I’ll ask.’
‘Thank you.’
‘What kind of hardware are we talking about, exactly?’
Adam handed over a hard copy of the list. ‘The deal is this, you can add on whatever this chapter needs up to ten per cent of the total price. Think of it as a finder’s fee.’
‘This is some very serious hardware.’
‘I represent a very serious chapter.’
‘All right then.’ Nigel Murphy still couldn’t quite banish the troubled expression from his face as he read down the list. ‘Give me your e-butler access code. I’ll call when I’ve set up the meeting.’
‘Good. One thing, have you had any new members join recently? The last couple of months or so?’
‘No. Not for about nine months now, unfortunately. I told you, we’re not very fashionable at the moment. We’re going to mount another recruitment drive in the general workers unions. But that won’t be for weeks yet. Why?’
‘Just checking.’
*
Sabbah hated himself for what he was doing. The comrade was obviously well connected in the party, probably in the executive cadre. Which meant he truly believed in what he was doing, especially if he’d been truthful about the grain train.
It wasn’t that Sabbah didn’t believe in their cause – no way. He absolutely hated the way everyone else in the world seemed to be doing better than him, that his background had condemned him to one life lived badly. The way society was structured prevented him from bettering himself. That was what attracted him to the Socialists in the first place, the way they were working to change things so that people like him would get a chance to live decently in an inclusive world.
All of which only made this worse. The comrade was actively working to bring down the companies and the plutocratic state which supported them. Which was a lot more than Sabbah ever seemed to do. All the seventh chapter did was hold endless meetings where they argued amongst themselves for what seemed like hours. Then there was the canvassing, days spent being abused, insulted, and treated with utter contempt by the very people they were trying to help. And of course the protests outside company offices and factories, ambushing politicians. Sabbah had lost count of how many times he’d been on the wrong, and very painful, end of a police shockwhip. The real reason he kept going these days was because of the rest of the chapter. He didn’t have many friends outside, not any more.
But he didn’t have any choice. Not in this.
It was nine years ago when he met the woman. The job that night had been so easy it would have been criminal not to do it. He’d gone along with a couple of old mates he’d known back from his gang years, when they’d all pulled a truck from the reform academy to run the streets. A delivery truck that made a nightly run from the CST p
lanetary station to various local wholesale warehouses about town. It was carrying crates of domestic goods from Augusta, all high quality. And the van was old, its alarm a joke.
Thanks to some decent targeted kaos software bought from a contact, they’d managed to intercept the van and lift its load clean within ten minutes. Sabbah even took a couple of maidbots with him when he went home in addition to his cut.
She was waiting for him when he walked through the door; a middle-aged woman with mild Asian features, her shoulder-length raven hair flecked with grey strands, wearing a smart business suit. Sitting in his lounge, looking like she belonged in that dingy two-room apartment more than he ever did.
‘You now have a choice,’ she said as his mouth was gaping open in surprise. ‘Either I’ll shoot you in self-defence, because you were assaulting a government official in the pursuit of her duties; or we make a deal and I’ll let you keep your dick.’
‘Whoo . . .’ Sabbah frowned at his door, silently cursing its alarm circuit for not warning him she’d broken in.
‘Or do you believe the Velaines public medical insurance scheme will pay for a new dick, Sabbah? That’s where I’m aiming, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
In horror he saw she had some kind of small black metal tube in her hand, and it really was levelled at his groin. He shifted the boxes containing the maidbots, gradually lowering them until they covered his hips and the hugely valuable personal organ situated there.
‘If you’re police, you won’t—’
The violent crack which her weapon produced made him cower. Scraps of foam packaging drifted through the air while the remnants of the maidbot dropped to the floor. The little machine’s crab-like electromuscle limbs spasmed for a while before collapsing limply. Sabbah stared at it. ‘Oh Christ on a crutch,’ he whispered. He gripped the remaining box even tighter.