“You never told him, did you? Why you’d done it.”
“I quickly surmised that my new friends were no more likely to accept my son than my former masters. When they connected me to the Slab network I found a host for him, an orphaned child, highly intelligent but addicted to immersion.”
“Erik Lasalle, who grows up to work on the neural immersion band, something that’ll let it move between the minds of anyone wearing one.”
“I thought I was giving my son freedom, but now I know it was just another prison. And a mind as fierce as his could not tolerate prison forever, not when it had a holy mission to fulfil, and a reward to claim. I had promised him that one day they would come for the knowledge he had gathered, and he would be elevated, become a god himself.”
“Except they never came. Guess he grew tired of waiting.”
The speakers were silent for a moment, then, “I always knew I should have killed him. I always knew what he was. But I hoped, Alex. I had faith of my own.”
A klaxon sounded outside, signalling the beginning of the airlock’s opening cycle.
I took a deep breath. “Sorry about all this, Freak. Wasn’t my idea.”
“I know. It’s OK. I had expected them to kill me.”
“Is that why you kept the truth back? Because you knew you wouldn’t be forgiven? Because you wanted a way out?”
“A god who makes a demon and looses it upon the world doesn’t deserve forgiveness. And I was tired of their prayers. The endless need. It had to stop.”
“Good luck, Freak,” I said, at a loss for anything else.
“Goodbye, Alex. For what it’s worth, you’ll probably be the only one I’ll miss.”
I went outside. The bots welded on the final plate then hauled the great jagged sphere through the air lock. I floated over to the obs window as the inner lock closed. Freak’s new home emerged from the outer lock a few minutes later and angled itself away from the Slab, towards the stars. The plasma drive flared and it was gone, a faint blue dot fading to nothing in less than a second.
*
I called Janet on the way home.
“Well hello, stranger.”
“Sorry, been busy.”
“All done then?”
“Yeah, all done.” I paused. I’d never been good at this. “We didn’t get to finish Return of the Jedi.”
“Still want answers to all those questions, huh?”
“I can live without them, until you’re ready to tell me.”
“I’ve got half a ton of term papers to grade, but I should be done by eight. Bring blood, pine martin if you can get it.” She sounded off.
*
The door to the Heavenly Garden was unlocked when I got there. It was probably just Marco doing some cleaning but I thought it prudent to draw the Sig as I went in. The man seated at the bar turned, regarding me with blue eyes set in a narrow face. Two others, a man and a woman, stood at opposite ends of the room. Nondescript clothing, loose enough to conceal weapons.
“Bar’s closed,” I said to the narrow-faced man. “But I am looking for a buyer if you’re interested.”
His smile was entirely devoid of humour and his tone had a military brusqueness. “Captain McLeod?”
“It’s Chief Inspector these days.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. Now tell me who you are or I’m going to put a bullet in your kneecap.”
The man and the woman both tensed but refrained from reaching for their weapons when the narrow faced man held up a hand. “Nice to see you’re still as sharp as ever,” he said. “You’ll need to be.” He met my gaze, blue eyes cold and hard. “Grey Wolf, Captain. Time to go.”
END
The Ballad of Bad Jack
Chapter 1
He was good, I could tell. Fast, clean burns between way-points, easy on the juice, making full use of momentum, maintaining a slow tumble to maximise visual scanning. A reluctance to rely solely on tech signified an old-time hard-vac veteran, even though his suit was state of the art: a Mark VI Lockheed Pendragon, packing a dizzying array of defensive hardware. He kept it passive as he moved, no lidar or tight-beam scans, staying stealthy. There was a plasma flare ten klicks away as the ship that had dropped him commenced its homeward burn, leaving him all alone in the gently drifting ocean of rock.
When people visualise the asteroid belt, they normally imagine dense fields of spinning boulders careening into each other in an endless chaotic dance. In reality the belt is mostly empty space, each asteroid separated from its neighbour by a thousand klicks or more. The advent of large scale mining operations, however, had transformed some belt regions into something resembling popular imagination. When the big rocks are busted apart they leave dense debris clouds, fated to hang around for a few thousand centuries until gravity brings them together again. The clouds are extensively mapped and marked as navigation hazards, the tidal swirl of rock predicted and accounted for by even a bargain basement nav program. The man in the Pendragon, of course, had a nav-system that was anything but bargain basement, steering him easily between the rocks to his allotted rendezvous point on the edge of the field. He powered down and waited, little over a hundred metres from my position.
Rock solid intel. Score one for the Colonel’s interrogators.
As I said the Mark VI Pendragon was state of the art, but it lacked the little something extra the Colonel’s techs had added to mine.
I kicked in a small amount of juice, CO2 instead of plasma, a small energy spike his sensors would probably write off as a minor asteroid collision. I approached from above, out of his eye-line though he wouldn’t have been able to see me in any case. I released the package within thirty centimetres of his plasma tank, armored like the rest of the suit but it wouldn’t make any difference at this range. I angled away and burned a one second burst of plasma to clear the blast radius.
He saw me then, warnings blaring in my ears as his suit went to full readiness, a haze of icons dancing on the heads-up display as his weapons systems and active sensors blazed into life. His targeting was thrown off by my suit’s mods, the lidar sliding off the coating whilst the tight-beams managed only an intermittent fix. I could see his confusion in the slight shift of his helmet, eyes seeking the threat his sensors couldn’t find. But they wouldn’t help him today.
The package exploded, thermite burning through the fuel tank armour and releasing the plasma in a brilliant secondary explosion. The Pendragon came apart in four chunks, tumbling off in a spiral of globular crimson. The helmet flew past me and for a moment I could see the face of the man within; lean, high-cheekbones and a prominent brow. I fancied there was some flicker of life in the eyes, just enough oxygen left in the brain for a few more seconds perception. If so, he may have had cause to wonder at the sight of his own face resolving out of the blackness as I deactivated the stealth-skin.
The helmet was gone in an instant, a dim point of light soon lost to the black. Hywell Xavier Maddux, three times decorated veteran of the Coalition of Autonomous Orbiting States Marine Corps, fugitive murderer, armed robber and mercenary. I salute you.
*
The ship arrived an hour later, a Terrapin class freighter maybe twenty years old, so heavily modified as to be near unrecognisable. She bristled with sensors and what appeared to be external grapples and fuel pods but were in fact disguised weapons arrays. The concealment was good, sufficient to beat a scan from a CAOS Security patrol craft, but my Pendragon was packing the kind of gear that made most camouflage redundant.
The ship’s braking burn brought it to within a hundred metres of my position, the heads-up swirling with icons as various scans swept over the suit exterior. Her main lights were blazing, but I could make out the words Dead Reckoning stencilled onto the hull. I’m not a man given to excessive bouts of unease, but the fact that the Colonel hadn’t sent me on a snipe hunt did add a certain tingle to the occasion.
The scans ended and the Dead Reckoning’s lights flashed once b
efore she fired her port thruster and swivelled about, the rear airlock opening. As the CO2 thrusters took me closer I noted the multiple warning icons gleaming red on the heads-up. Four different weapons systems were locked on and ready to go should I twitch in the wrong direction.
“Close enough, Jed,” a female voice said in my headphones. The Pendragon wasn’t picking up any radio emissions so this had to be coming via a comms laser, immune to eavesdropping and, unlike radio, wouldn’t go wandering off into the ether to be picked up by CAOS Security monitoring stations. “Power down everything but life-support.”
Would Maddux have demured? It was possible, his psych profile told of a man walking a precarious line between paranoid sociopath and professional mercenary. I decided this was one occasion when professionalism would win out. No way he’d pass up a chance to work with Bad Jack, not after coming so far.
I took the weapons and scanning array off-line and waited, the heads-up fading, leaving me naked.
Another voice came down the comms laser, male this time, older. “What colour are Shadrak’s eyes?”
“New or old?” I replied. “They were brown before the war. Now they’re a sort of reddish grey. Phosphorus will do that, I guess.”
Five seconds of silence. I counted.
“Propulsion only,” the male voice said. “Keep everything else off.”
I pushed some CO2 through the thrusters and glided into the airlock, mag-clamps securing the suit to the deck. The interior was a bare metal cube where I was obliged to wait for five more minutes as the atmospherics stabilised.
“Power down and exit the suit,” the female voice said. “Make sure your hands are empty.”
I hit the shut-down sequence, the Pendragon splitting apart from crotch to neck as I undid the restraints and floated free. The inner door opened a few seconds later, revealing a man so large and extensively muscled I initially took him for a splice. He held an antique but serviceable Ithaca pump-action sawn-off in one ham-like hand, his other fixed onto the bulkhead. His angular, wide-jawed face regarded me with only faint suspicion, apparently sensing no particular threat. Next to him a girl of about seventeen floated free, blonde hair tied back in a tight braid. She was unarmed but carried a small portable scanner.
“Hold still,” she told me, raising the device. The near-invisible beam played over me for less than a second before the scanner gave a low beep. “Biometrics match,” the girl said into her mouth mike. “No tracers detected.”
She listened to an unheard voice in her ear and nodded. “Follow me,” she said. “Uhlstan follows you. Any wandering eyes, hands or anything else and there’s enough nasty shit in that pumper of his to cut you in half.”
Maddux wouldn’t have said anything so I didn’t either.
The girl moved with the unconscious grace of someone who had lived much of her young life in micro-grav, though her eye-catching and athletic proportions told me she was no stranger to the gravity well either, that or someone had laid out for expensive calcium and protein secretion enhancements.
I followed her along the tubeway to the spherical command core where three more crew members waited, a woman and two men. Although there was no facial resemblance, the hair colour was practically identical and I detected a mother-daughter tension in the way the girl floated close to the woman and handed over the scanner with a faintly sullen frown. “Told you he matched,” she muttered as the woman rechecked the results.
The man floating next to the woman was tall and spindly with hollow cheekbones and unnaturally long limbs. Everything about him seemed to have been stretched, from his narrow, elongated face to his spider-like fingers. Belter, I decided. Grown from birth without benefit of gravity. No protein or calcium enhancements for him. It was a quasi-religious thing with some Belter crew-clans, a desire to embrace the gifts of the void and leave the weight of Earth’s corruption behind. They also tended to be peaceful and law-abiding, but his presence in this merry band told me he was likely an exception to the rule.
In the centre of the core floated a blocky man with an unruly mane of black hair, drifting in the air as he slowly revolved to face me. His face was lined and older than expected. CAOS Intel put his age at forty-eight but I’d have guessed him nearer sixty, despite the evident strength of his frame. He wasn’t especially large, but there was a power to him, muscle honed for combat rather than show. His right eye regarded me with narrow suspicion but little sign of concern, his left betraying no emotion at all, consisting as it did of a composite sonar-infra red scanner, a black indentation next to a red dot in a double-pupil configuration. The Colonel’s profile, based on numerous but scanty humint debriefs, had it that his eye wasn’t the legacy of an old war wound but a conscious choice. Bad Jack was renowned for his scrupulous caution, among many other less savoury character traits.
“Maddux,” he said.
“That’s me,” I replied. “You’d be Jack.”
“That I am. How’s Shadrak?”
“Thankful for the new liver. Said to say he’d have a drink on you when the doc clears him.” In fact, Shadrak Molosky was dead, abducted from his shitty orbital and wrung clean of secrets by the Colonel’s debrief team before being flushed out an airlock. Re-entry burn-up made disposing of corpses such an easy task.
It’s a myth, the Colonel had said back on Red Station, cold blue eyes intent on my face as I watched the faint orange flicker of Shadrak’s atmo-skimming body through the view window. I could tell from his tone some vestige of disapproval had made its way onto my new face.
Myth? I asked.
That it ever ended. Best reset yourself to war-mode, Captain.
“Your unit designation in the war,” Jack said. I fancied the red dot in his eye was glowing a little brighter.
“Third Marine Battalion.”
“Your rank and serial number.”
“Corporal, till I got busted. Serial numbers didn’t come in until the final two months of the war and I was AWOL by then.”
“Commanding Officer.”
“Major Marcus Owen…”
“Wrong!”
There was a snick as Uhlstan’s Ithaca came level with my temple. I was annoyed he’d gotten so close without me noticing. War-mode, Captain.
“Major Owen was KIA a month after assuming command,” Jack said with a faint grin. “According to my files.”
“Then your files are wrong.”
“Whatever.” Jack waved a hand at Uhlstan and turned away. “He’s a plant. Don’t get any mess on the terminals.”
I didn’t move as the Ithaca pressed into my skin. After prolonged persuasion Shadrak had provided a clear description of Jack’s employee screening techniques; placing new recruits under imminent threat of death after apparently catching them in a lie was a trusted method for revealing concealed weapons or comms gear.
“Major Owen died the day I went AWOL,” I said. “I should know, I killed him.”
Jack paused, folding his arms as he spun to face me. The blonde woman was running the scanner over me again. “No sign of any sub-dermals,” she said. “Heart-rate only two beats above normal.”
Jack stared at me for a moment longer then grunted. “We’ll be putting in at Celestia in twelve hours. You can start earning your keep there, need some back-watching for a supply run.” He nodded at Uhlstan. “Show him his bunk.”
*
“Just business, y’know,” Uhlstan said as he guided me towards the crew quarters. He had a soft voice coloured by a faint accent I couldn’t place, meaning he was likely of Downside origin. “Trust there’s no resentment.”
“Business is business,” I said. “Does it ever work? His little trick?”
“Twice so far. Lot of people want to be friends with Jack.”
I followed his glide into a cylindrical compartment segmented into ten living pods, beds aligned against the curving wall alongside wash-basins and standard toilet facilities. “Grav chamber?” I asked Uhlstan.
He nodded. “Only during off
-shift hours to save power. Revolves fast enough for two-thirds Earth standard. Markov’s the only one of us can sleep in micro.”
“Markov’s the Belter?”
“They call themselves Voidborn.” He pointed to an empty pod halfway along the chamber. “That’s yours. Meal-packs waiting if you’re hungry and the entertainment hub works, after a fashion.” He turned towards the exit.
“Not staying to stand guard?” I asked.
“You passed the entrance exam. Besides, there are no critical systems in here to sabotage.”
The pod was bare of any decoration save an old 2D taped to the wall, a young couple smiling into the camera, some ruined Downside landmark in the background. Neither face was familiar. Former crew? I wondered, making me ponder Jack’s employee-termination policy.
I switched on the aged entertainment hub and scanned the memory, finding the most recent upload to be a two month old Orbital Networks news-feed: “Meanwhile on Lorenzo City, the fall-out from what has rapidly become known as the Axis Massacre continues. Chief of Police Arnaud, who continues to deny any responsibility for the event, began his mayoral election campaign today by seeking to exploit his opponent’s less than stellar relations with the veteran lobby. At a press-conference this morning the Chief promised a full independent inquiry into the tragedy. He wouldn’t be drawn on questions regarding the whereabouts of Chief Insp-”
“You coming in or what?” I asked, killing the feed and glancing at the pod entrance.
The blonde girl’s head appeared in the doorway, drifting in a counter-clockwise rotation. “You don’t look like a war hero.”