“Was that reliable?” Jack asked.
“It seems to be. Nothing else has pinged.”
“As long as he doesn’t sell us in.”
I said, “I doubt he will. It would compromise him. He’d have to try to cut an illegal deal with the UN, which they’d keep until it was expedient to burn him. Also, they hate the UN more than we do.”
Juan said, “There has been a significant amount of moral support from NovRos.”
Glenn said, “On the one hand, good. On the other, I might prefer a higher class of bastards as allies.”
Juan said, “So we’re going back into action, in two ways.”
“First we’re going to need to get more personal. All UN personnel are now targets and we’ll take targets of opportunity. I’d like to minimize threats to families. It’s not their war, and they pack a huge psychological footprint against us.
“Then, we’re going to start running fake ops and false-flags both. In Earth space.”
Mo said, “Damn, that’s ballsy.”
“We tried avoiding them, and it did keep pressure off home, but they’ve violated all the niceties, so we are, too. We have to scare them into withdrawal.”
Jack asked, “Think it’ll work?”
“If not, it will at least mess them up.”
The news from back home was frightening. I hadn’t been there in years, other than the Halo, but it was still my home.
Earth had occupied, but had destroyed the economy in the process. Everything was down and closed. Food wasn’t a problem, with the huge agricultural sector, but no one had jobs to pay for it.
“So I’m going to translate,” Roger said. “The ‘offered’ aid to farmers is mandatory oversight with a bunch of fees and adminwork to get the minerals they need for production, followed by mandatory inspection, tagging, et cetera of produce, and mandatory regulated packaging and transport, all of it billed back to the farmers. Large amounts are rejected, so the price goes up. In the cities, no one has any jobs because there are no imports, and the UN mandates a variety of ‘free’ benefits to employees that employers have to pay for, so a lot of them went broke and closed shop, which is now illegal, so they ran out at night.”
“Wait,” Jack cut in. “How is it illegal to stop doing business?”
“It’s bad for the workers.”
“But if you have no assets?”
“They consider that punishment for not being successful. And if you are successful, they tax you until you break that way.”
He looked more disturbed by this than I’d ever seen him. “How can you be successful with all that management? And no customers?”
“You’re trying to be logical.”
“How does anyone make money in the UN?”
I said, “Mostly black market, and large corps with ties to the government, who use their reps to negotiate exemptions.”
“‘Reps’?”
“Their representatives in the General Assembly of Nations.”
He looked even more confused. “I’d heard of that. How do companies have political representation?”
“I don’t know, but it keeps them in business and the government gets a cut.”
Mira said, “But there were small outlets on station.”
“Almost all of those are owned by some larger conglomerate,” I explained. “They use their own name, but they’re sourcing someone else’s goods and riding on their revenue ID.”
“Gods.”
I said, “I’d never imagined the UN would try to apply their system to ours. I can’t even guess how you’d set it up. First you’d have to find everyone.”
Teresa said, “Even then, you’d have to plow quadrillions into creating databases, establishing policies and offices. How can they afford this?”
“They can’t,” Juan said. “And it’s our job to make it as much more expensive as possible, until they collapse. That’s why we’re heading for Sol system soon, too.”
I wasn’t sure space travel was going to survive this. Our system was dying fast, and how long could the UN afford to maintain troops all over the place and transit costs that weren’t generating income?
If we went down, and someone else went down, Earth would go down for certain, and that was it for civilization. The number of people didn’t matter. The costs and the fragility mattered.
I may be wrong. I’m a cargo handler. But I know what it takes to run a ship and make a living, and how thin that margin is. Supporting another system, which is what they were trying to do, by remote, was like trying to fix a plumbing leak by setting your money on fire and flushing it, so the ash would fill the crack.
CHAPTER 26
Three jumps later we were in Sol system, and cleared for cross-system with a beacon. We finally arrived at Sol JP3 across from Caledonia.
I guess the reports of other “terror” attacks were true. The station was locked down tight. The engineers had built a jetty, and we docked to that. They sent a crew to detach the train, and a powered dock to take the onboard cargo. Some of the V-suits read “INSPECTOR” or “SECURITY.” They ran scanners over everything, and I was worried we’d get nailed.
“Are they billing us for that?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” Roger said. “We’re barely making a flip on this leg.”
Pretty soon ships would stop calling if they did that.
“What are we loading?”
“Dried and nitro-packed food, sundry goods and administrative technical gear for the Freehold occupation forces.”
“. . . they’re paying us to take stuff to our own system?”
“It’s times like this that war is awesome. Now, if we can just get them to pay us to bring it back . . .”
They were still unloading, and charging us dock time for the time it took them to do it, even though we weren’t docked.
I wondered how many of the other ships were somebody’s spies only here for some leverage.
Roger said, “It’ll be late tomorrow night before they finish reloading us.”
Once the unloading crew had cleared ship, Jack and Teresa went aft with scanning gear.
“Look what we found,” she said when they returned. She had a plastic jar with layers of gel padding and something inside those.
“I’m assuming that’s a bug?”
“It was. It’s now getting a lot of white and pink noise that sounds like engine testing and fluid transfer.”
“Interesting,” Shannon said. “Just us, all ships, random, or specific craft?”
Glenn asked, “And how much could it pick up from back there?”
“It would have taken a lot of filtering but anything in the bay would have been audible. It’s isolated now.”
“What about outside the hull?” Mira asked.
Bast said, “I ran a pretty strong microwave beam around. We’ll want to check for intel, but I should have cooked anything.”
Juan said, “Nevertheless, keep chatter even less than minimum, and . . .” he nodded to Mira, who did something with her console. “. . . we’ll continue this with audio jamming.”
He sat back and brought up an external view of the station.
“We’re trying to both have a logistical effect and a psychological one. We can’t readily get through the triple gate they’ve got. So we need an alternate way into the terminal, via personnel lock. Inboard container C-five W has the stuff.”
I remembered that one. It was one of the “rich people” stash of cargo we kept re-manifesting with help from local shills.
“That stuff?” I asked. “It’s recreational beach equipment.”
“Which can hold pressure and supply oxygen.”
I thought through the manifest I’d seen months ago. They were actually planning to use wetsuits for EVA.
“Underwater gear in vacuum?”
Bast said, “Dive tanks and fishbowls, with gaskets and harnesses. Jack will set you up.”
“How reliable do you think that will be?” I was thinking they were go
ing to use friction tape and insulation foam. That was spacer engineering.
“As long as it gets us in, and hopefully out, it’s fine.”
“I’m guessing you need a map?”
“No. Now you really earn your pay.”
I gulped and my guts tensed up.
“I really don’t know this station well.” This was another one I’d visited once.
“We trust your knowledge of the stations generally, and culture,” he said.
What they came up with was more sophisticated than I expected. The bowls had foam gaskets on a yoke, and strapped and pilehooked to the top of the wetsuit, with oxy bottles on the back. The fittings for the oxy lines looked very professional, and professionally mounted into the helmet with bearing locks and gaskets.
“Can you get fitted?”
“Me?”
“We’ll come back in and need to be out of sight. You’ve got to lead.”
This was insane, and probably deadly. And I’d signed a contract for exactly that.
It was the most intimate, non-sexy thing I’ve ever done. Shannon, Bast and I stripped naked to get into the suits, and Teresa and Jack helped us.
The wetsuit went on over what felt like a gallon of lube. It was exactly the same lube used for sex toys. That made sense. Jack slathered it all over my back, I got my front, breasts, thighs and down, then he got my arms while I did my own collar. It was slippery and sensual, and damned cold in the air.
It wasn’t even sexy watching them lube Roger up. This was business, and someone was going to die in the process.
I wiggled and pulled with Jack’s help, getting the flexible membrane over me. The suit was a tight barrier. The boots were military arctic issue, solid elastomer, and then covered with polymer bags and elastic. The gloves were done the same way. The oxy and nitry hoses were clicked into the fish bowl, and I wondered why the hell I was doing this.
It was a vacuum suit. It had no heat or cooling, no relief mechanism. There were no transponders or even latches for lines. The only gauge was a blood meter clipped to my ear, and I was expected to adjust the O2 feed with a knob on my left shoulder.
“Can you reach it?” Jack asked.
“Just,” I said.
“Good. Keep your color above orange and below violet.”
“Got it,” I said. Yes, I wanted to keep breathing.
The maneuver harness was the most professional looking bit. I’d never used one, but it looked right. I don’t know if they’d built those or bought them. Or stolen them.
We had a crew lock next to the rear cargo hatch, that was officially connected to the escape pod.
The others cycled through first, then greenlit me. I locked in, pumped down, locked out, and the pod had been shifted a half meter on its ways. I could just squeeze out into space.
I’m EVA-qualified and have used several crawlie pods to traverse a cargo train. I’d done it in a rated suit once, a few weeks before. In all cases, I had two tethers or a trolley cable to hold me in place.
Now I had neither.
I didn’t have any commo, either.
I can’t tell you how absolutely terrified I felt right then. We were unattached, in improvised suits with no commo. Any mistake would mean either instant depressurization or lingering hypoxia.
I climbed out and pointed myself toward the control blister on the hub. I was told the thrust vest should be aligned with my mass, close enough, and that I could make small corrections in flight. Shannon had been very specific.
“You eyeball with both eyes to make sure you’re aligned, then just the barest gas, and repeat every hundred seconds or so. You don’t want to hit at speed, and you don’t want to ricochet or flyby.”
“Have you done this before?” I asked.
“Yes, in training, never like this.”
“Okay,” I said. At least it wasn’t just some clever-assery they’d come up with.
Very slow, they’d cautioned. We had divs. I stared at my target, checked with each eye alone, then took a deep, deep breath. It was almost too much oxy, and my head spun. I held it in until I leveled out, then did it.
I opened the valve just a RCH and closed it. I waited, counted a full hundred seconds, and looked around. I’d moved about fifty meters. The rough parallax scale I had, printed on paper, confirmed that. Yes, that was probably a good velocity.
It was hard to see any movement, and I was still twitchy with no line. I was in free space. The money wasn’t enough for this, so, I obviously wasn’t doing it for the money.
It was fucking cold. We were in shadow, and radiated heat. My hands and feet were numb by the time we were a half K along.
It was a half div before we reached the lock. It had apparently been either an emergency or cargo lock at some point. Now it was an inspection and maintenance lock with steady traffic.
As we approached the lock blister, I saw others EVA. They were doing repairs and inspections of two ships brought to this end for close examination. I hoped they didn’t examine us.
I wondered how we’d avoid attention. There were several other people pulling maintenance on the station hull and sensors, using crawly-drones. I guess they were just too busy to pay attention.
No one gave us a glance. I figured it was three things. We wore pressure suits, so we must belong outside. There are so many models and styles, no one would pay attention to one unless it was really sexy and techie. And even improvised, they were well-made and looked professional.
Besides, most spacers aren’t familiar with wetsuits. Hell, I wasn’t.
We locked through with several others and nobody gave any notice or said a word. I was sweating even though I was still shivering, and trembling a bit from fear of the outside, fear of notice, and recovering from it all, but no one mentioned that, either. The guy next to me looked pretty wiped out from whatever work he was peforming.
Most of the EVAs had lockers inside the personnel dock for changing. A few did wear them all the way back to their ships. Juan didn’t want us hanging out here. We planned to change elsewhere so we didn’t leave a trail either way.
There were locker rooms, showers and dolly-boxes all the way through. We made our way, and were almost out when a guy looked up and said, “Hey, are those amphibious suits?”
Shannon said, “I dunno, might be. We got them used.”
“Military surplus?”
“Dunno. Suit Cycler had them on special a few years back.”
“Neat.”
We kept walking, hoping for no more interaction with anyone. All the cameras and sniffers were threat enough.
I was on new deck here. I’d never been in any controlled areas off-dock. All the hatches in the passage were sealed.
But there was a vestibule around one that would give us room to change if we hurried. It had some stacked crates that weren’t even dogged down, so it was probably not used much.
We all peeled and squirmed out of the suits. They clung worse than wet spandex, sticking then pulling loose, and the lube gel had dried sticky. Bast handed me some wipes that first made it all slippery again, then cleaned it off.
Not bad. He had nice tone, nice lines and I could definitely see him spreading me. It was a shame we wouldn’t have a chance until this was over, if ever.
Shannon was also quite acceptable. They had intelligence, fitness from exercise and that emotional strength I could feel.
Shannon had shipsuits in his satchel, and slipper boots. We had no underwear. We had passes that were fake, but people generally don’t look at them inside a perimeter. Bast had a tool pack across one shoulder. Hopefully with the pouches and suits we’d blend in enough.
Rolling the wetsuits was tough. There was no way they’d pack small enough. Even being modern ones, and I gather the old ones of rubber were huge, they would fill a fair-sized backpack. Bast used some line ties and turned them into discreet bundles. He ripped the tubes off the helmets and stacked those behind the crates.
We were on the night hours by
system time, but it was getting close to morning. There are people up all cycle round, and more were going to be up soon.
CHAPTER 27
As we walked out of the service passage into the terminal passages, someone challenged us.
“Hey!”
Sebastian said, “Sorry, we got lost. Thought there was a service vator we could use.”
“No. This is operations only.”
“I said we’re sorry.”
We made it out and into the station service passage behind that. We were still in restricted volume, even more so. This was the public access for the processors, not the underdeck for the maintainers.
Someone had seen or said something. A squad of security goons came at us from three sides. They had carbines out, and I was staring at a muzzle.
“All of you face down on the deck and do not move.”
I raised my hands and puckered up, imagining interrogation Round Two.
I don’t know who moved first, but it was suddenly a melee. Sebastian had one guy bent backwards over his knee and his hand around the throat armor of a second. Shannon was on the ground with two others in a tangle.
One of the last pair waved his carbine around, looking for a spot to shoot, I suppose. The last one had me covered. I couldn’t do anything without getting shot.
Then he turned his head a fraction to watch the thrashing legs in Shannon’s fight.
I tuellered him. I have no idea why, I just shoved and sprinted. He glanced back at me, I heard the safety click, and why was his weapon on safe after a fight started? And I hit him, my left arm around a thigh, my right hand heel under his chin. He staggered into the wall and fell on me.
I tried to roll on top, then realized his buddy might shoot me if I did. I was safer here.
He was heavier than me, of course, and had armor. He broke my grip and struggled to get up until I thumbed him in the throat and squeezed. It was just above his armor, and he started choking and coughing.
Then a foot kicked him in the face and almost broke my thumb in the process. It was Shannon’s.