(Anarchy asteroid field, Struve 2398 binary, two years after the Liberation of Darwin)
Until I came to Anarchy, I never knew four people could survive on twenty-five cubic meters of air. Air is the very foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy. Without it, you die in minutes, not days or even hours. On this asteroid, people die of hypoxia every week.
The numbers are as harsh as the coldscape. Each of us breathes roughly eleven thousand liters of air per day, give or take for size, metabolism and exertion. Quick datapad calculations will tell you that’s around five hundred fifty liters of pure oxygen per person per day. On its own, our cubicle wasn’t large enough to support the four of us. That’s why we had recyclers and carbon scrubbers. But recyclers are not one hundred percent efficient. And scrubbers need to be replaced as they blacken.
That means each shift, I need to clear enough in salvage mining to replenish the equivalent of twenty-two hundred liters of oxygen from the Exchange. That doesn’t account for food, water, rent and utilities, or the supplies and fuel I need to do my job. That’s just what I need for us to breathe another day. Me, Nadira, Sara and Abrami.
There is no law on Anarchy, no government, no police, only a code of honor that not everyone shares. It isn’t might makes right or only the strong survive as most people think. But without solars, weapons or contacts, you wouldn’t make it long. Anarchy is the ultimate freedom. With that comes responsibility for every action you take throughout the day. Like the coldscape outside the airlock, Anarchy has little pity or remorse.
After Darwin, we’d gone from being revolutionaries to refugees, each stop a little farther on the Fringe. We did our time on Grant, Home and Liberty. At each camp, I saved every solar that wasn’t stolen until we made it here. Three systems, seven camps and two years later, and we finally had a room with a private san, just over two by three by four meters, complete with all the recycled air we could afford to breathe. After being chased halfway across human space by LOW OrbIT and the Green Revolution, that cubicle was our own little world. Out here, you carried your own gear, hauled your own ore. There was no room for heroes, least of all a renegade hero of the Green Revolution. Sub-Commander Z maintains there are no heroes, only people who don’t let their fear get in the way of what needs to be done. A nice philosophy she discovered after one of hers went missing.
We weren’t supposed to be in the limo that day on Darwin, none of us. I still haven’t sorted out whether Abrami had gone rogue or if Z had set us up. Maybe Venn had sold us out along the way. Abrami hadn’t told me where we were going when I’d picked him up that morning. There was a security meeting but that’s not where we’d headed. By then we were all looking for a way to get off world before LOW Orbit descended like a hammer. The Green Revolution on Darwin was over, failed, dead. The corporate backers from the surrounding colonies had made sure of that. It was time to creep back to Scorn or Down 2 and regroup. Or find a hole in which to hide.
But we escaped. Now, we lived as far out on the Fringe as we could get, like a dysfunctional common-law family where I played the part of the childhood friend turned patient, paternal uncle.
I still have no idea where Abrami had picked up Sara. I’d never seen her before he brought her to the car. She looked like she could be his daughter. But she also looked amazingly like his little sister the last time I saw her on Cooperation so many years ago. Abrami must have thought so, too. He confused their names so often now that the girl answered to either, Sara or Jo.
Nadira was at least as veiled in shadows. We’d run across her in the first camp on Grant. One day, she’d corralled Sara somewhere in the shelter city. Sara quickly adopted her as a surrogate mother. Nadira was one of us, a Green revolutionary disguised among the fleeing refugees. She had the history down, knew all the code words. She insinuated herself into our lives from there. The problem was she and Abrami didn’t really get along. Abrami never liked her but kept her around for Sara’s sake. Nadira didn’t trust Abrami with the girl. But Abrami denied Sara nothing that she wanted as if he were making something up to Jo.
One of us has to keep an eye on Sara each shift. That usually fell to Nadira. On bad days, Abrami gets forgetful as though he’d become untethered in the coldscape, drifting in and out of time. More importantly, one of us has to guard the cubicle. That wouldn’t be a problem if Abrami were always in the here and now. Luckily, Nadira was a feral she-wolf when it came to guarding her adopted pup. Though lately, her predatory instincts ran more toward fleecing the other refugees for anything she could buy with a pretty smile. Or even a little more.
Abrami could work a cutter, a grav bike and the hard suit as well as I could and Lord knows he would, as hard as me or harder. But Abrami couldn’t work now. That video made him infamous. Even if he weren’t, he was not a well man anymore. But he’s my friend, almost a little brother. I owed him for sealing up my chest on Darwin, carrying me like deadweight before the gunships homed in, finding me a surgeon. Besides, no one pays attention to me. Everyone thinks Mike Dunne is dead. They saw it on the video.
Each of us had a soft suit for operating outside the asteroid-colony’s limited protection, but we could only afford one hard suit for real mining operations. We each carried our soft suits with us all of the time. The hard suit stood in the cubicle until it was needed like a dull bronze guardian, ancient and rigid, physically hardened against radiation, pitted by micro-meteors. That suit was the only thing that kept us all alive and breathing.
Each shift began at the Exchange, bidding on supplies, airlock access and fuel. Each shift ended in the Chaosium, listening for rumors of prospects for tomorrow and seeing who among us had and hadn’t survived today.
The Exchange dealt in solars, not credits. On good days, I traded iridium for them, on bad days, nickel, lead or ice. There are no claims on Anarchy, just asteroids you mine for a shift unless you had the people to occupy and defend one.
I started the day by purchasing air and paying to get the grav bike out of hock from the storage depot. I didn’t own the grav bike but had an agreement for priority rental. Webb, the storage owner, sometimes sublet it to other refugees to help defer the costs.
The main asteroid-colony is trapped between the Struve binaries, the collection point for refuse that no longer had the energy to maintain its own orbit. A deeper desert than Darwin and as desiccated as the coldscape, Anarchy was on the margin of Struve’s usable gravity well. There was only a shallow slope for the grav bike to latch onto. That made reaching my intended target tricky.
I had a line on a rogue rock a long hop out at its closest approach, right at the bleeding edge of the bike’s range. I’d done my homework to track it down, a micro-comet on its one-hundred-sixty-seven-year pilgrimage that brought it just within my reach. That’s if no collisions or close calls had altered its orbit into something more erratic. A few thousand kilometers and I’d be out of luck.
In a few days it would skim past Anarchy, close enough to grab if someone hadn’t snatched it up already. That’s if the survey entry wasn’t some Fringer’s idea of a joke. I’d raided a bootleg of the initial system survey at the camp on Liberty. It included the comet’s spectroscopy as it had set itself ablaze for the survey crew. Spectroscopy that burned with the signature of iridium. No one on Anarchy knew I had that entry stashed away. Information is currency. Secrecy and sealed lips are as important as any lock.
Most salvage miners would rather stake their lives on something more dependable. Long-cycle strays were either boom or complete bust. Though technically, most of asteroids in this densely packed zone were tumbling strays. Thus the name of the system.
I eased the grav bike away from the main asteroid-colony into the shifting chaos of the surrounding field. I kept my scanners on passive to make it just a fraction harder for any lurkers who wanted to track where I went. As descendent omnivores, humans always find it more economical to pick out a rival’s fertile feeding grounds than spend the resources to discover one for themselves. Monkey see, monkey do.
Beyond the limit of most in-system sensors, I setup on a stable rock long known as dead where I could scan the starfield. I needed to catch a visual with the high-powered optical scanners to confirm my target’s approach. There it was, creeping closer, a dark smudge across the backdrop of stars, just as it should be. It would fall within the bike’s range in a handful of days. To fully exploit it, I’d need the hard suit.
I was hoping to scrape off enough iridium from the micro-comet to move somewhere civilized, or at least set us up with better accommodations. A place where the air was clean and clear, and free, not purchased day to day.
Once I’d completed the survey and logged the information where I could run it through the hard suit’s more powerful datapad, I made a quick circuit to a few nearby prospects in case anyone was watching. On the Fringe it always pays dividends to have a covering routine.
Back on Anarchy, I cleared all the logs on the bike, returned it to Webb’s storage depot and bagged up my soft suit. I traded a double-handful of nickel at the Exchange for few solars, then headed for the Chaosium.
The Chaosium was as segregated as human space, only sorted into descending levels of desirability according to Fringe logic like an inverse structure of Dante’s rings, or a asteroid mine where the better ore was found deeper within. Without solars or contacts, Green refugees like me could only watch the cliques on the more selective lower layers with envy from above, like fallen angels who wished we’d fallen further.
The Chaosium was always warm if only from the tightly packed conditions on the lower levels. As if the Anarchists were battling back the coldscape just beyond the wall. It was a place to eat, drink and forget, not worry about tomorrow.
There was a loose confederation of refugees on Anarchy but we grew fewer and fewer each day. Fringers had no love for the Green Revolution or its castoffs. Fortunately, they had little more for LOW OrbIT, corporations or anyone else telling them what to do. They were pretty much live and let live, or let die as the case may be. Anarchists reserved their empathy for their own.
None of the other salvage miners were on the upper level when I arrived, like they were all off working overtime on other overlooked or overworked asteroids, the only kind refugees could usually afford. I nursed a local phytoplankton beer that was about as palatable as the fermented dregs of a carbon filter. Anarchists said it was an acquired taste. I hoped not to hang around long enough to agree. I kept telling myself it beat rancid mare’s milk, soya-wine and a thousand other things humans had brewed across the centuries to dull the everyday pain of a monotonous existence. Bottom line, at least it met that spec.
I sat at a table with my back to a corner where I could see the room. An old habit I picked up on Cooperation and honed to a survival instinct on Darwin. Today it paid off as I saw a face from the Revolution that I never expected to see again headed for my table. Yevgeny Gantt, Sub-Commander Z’s Enforcer. I could have left, but didn’t see the point. If Z had tracked us this far, dodging now would only delay the inevitable.
Gantt wasn’t conspicuously armed, other than with a triangular torso and the heavily muscled legs that came with once having been a semi-pro zero-g kickboxer. I knew he had weapons. Everyone did on Anarchy. Bringing one into the Chaosium was suicidal. The last thing Anarchists wanted was indiscriminate fire that would cripple a vital system or decompress a compartment when it clipped a bulkhead wall. If you missed your target, the liability was apt to run higher than your life. Fringe justice came in the form of an angry yet eerily competent mob. Some social contracts were meant to go unbroken.
Gantt spun a chair around and sat across from me looking over its back. “Hey, Mikey. How long did you think you could hide from us?”
I didn’t ask the stupid questions like what are you doing here or how did you find us. “Long enough not to see the likes of you again, Gantt.”
“It’s too late for that now. Next round’s on you.”
I signaled the waitress. I didn’t have a fistful of solars but I had enough to hear what Gantt had to say if only to see how deep we were in. The waitress brought our beer bulbs. “So you found me. Now what? A sanctioned killing so I become an example?”
He laughed. “As much as that would be my plan, Z wants Abrami back.”
“What makes you think he’s alive?” I took a pull from the nasty concoction just to see if I could tempt him into doing the same. A petty game.
He left his bulb undisturbed, his eyes fixed on me like a cat watching a cockroach, waiting for it to move, not so much prey as practice. “For starters, you are officially dead. Someone had to save you. Abrami’s the only choice. Either that or you’re a spy. Besides, we know he’s here. We tracked you through the camps. Every time they required a registration, you moved on.”
“Wish I could help you but I’m just trying to scrounge a living out here now. I only signed up for Darwin and Darwin’s gone.”
“That’s too bad, Mikey.” Gantt shook his head. “Venn was a friend of mine. I saw how you left him hanging out to die. If you can’t help us, no one will care if you disappear.”
“I’ll think about it.” I stood without finishing my beer and grabbed the suit.
“Discuss it with your cubemates. Yeah, I already know your buying air for more than one. And think fast. It’s not a long-term offer.”
---
When I got back to the cubicle, Nadira was putting the finishing touches on her makeup. Sara was playing with the hard suit’s datapad at our tiny, pre-fab table. Abrami was nowhere in sight, probably crashed on his bunk behind the privacy curtain.
“Sara, honey,” Nadira said, “stop playing with that. I’ve told you a thousand times that datapad is not a toy.”
I dropped my equipment beside the door. I crossed the cubicle in two steps and handed Sara my datapad to play with. Like the hard suit, it was Russian, nearly indestructible, but contained mostly surveying and survival applications. She still seemed fascinated to explore what it could do. We needed to get her one of her own. Maybe soon.
“Where are you going?” I asked Nadira.
“Out,” she said as if that were a sufficient answer. “Don’t look at me like that. I have just as much right as you.”
That meant she was headed for the Chaosium for the night to see how many free drinks she could collect as she worked her way down the levels. I often wondered what exactly she did. When we’d first arrived, I used to follow her or pay others to. She’d never slipped so I gave up, if you could call that trusting her. Now, I didn’t really want her out there. Who knew how many people Gantt had hanging around.
“Why don’t you stay home tonight? I need you to look after Sara, maybe take her somewhere. I need to talk to Abrami privately. How’s he doing anyway?”
“Drifty again today.” She worked up her eyes in the mirror without a pause. “He keeps calling Sara Jo and thinking I’m his mother. You can watch her for a change. I need a break from this cage.”
Since Darwin, Abrami slipped in and out of time. He kept flashing back to our childhood on Cooperation. He remembered me if only younger, and cast Sara as his sister, but Nadira he couldn’t always sync. The Greens were just as foreign. For him the Revolution hadn’t started yet. I wasn’t sure he’d remember Darwin today. Or how much help he’d be.
The privacy curtain shifting along its track drew my attention. Abrami stood watching us. It was hard to tell from his eyes exactly where or when he was, whether he was all in the here and now.
“How’s my little angel?” he said to Sara, ignoring both Nadira and me.
“I don’t like it here anymore,” she said, flipping through the menus of my datapad. “I liked it better in the camp with all my friends.”
“Don’t you worry, my little Saraphim,” Abrami said soothingly before finishing as he often did, “one day we’ll get you back to heaven. Now, how would you like to play a game?”
He squeezed in at the table beside her, pulled a die-cube out of his pocket and set it between them. As he manipulated the top face with a quick, expert hand, the cube looked familiar for an instant. Where had I seen it before? Using it and the datapad, he created the rules to a game that a six-year-old could understand. Except that he’d used the right nickname for Sara, he sounded like he was back on Cooperation playing with his sister. There was only one way to find out.
“We’ve got a problem,” I said, looking directly at Abrami.
“What kind of problem,” Nadira asked, not taking the hint.
“A family problem.” I glanced at Sara, then nodded Nadira toward the door.
“Do you want me here or not?” she protested. Suddenly, she didn’t want to leave.
“No,” Abrami said. “If there’s a problem it affects us all.” This was unusual. Even on his best days, he had no use for Nadira.
I thought for a moment then decided to launch right in and see where it went. “I just saw Gantt in the Chaosium.”
“Who’s Gantt?” Nadira asked.
I ignored her and watched Abrami. For an instant, I saw a flicker of recognition that quickly disappeared. Perhaps he wasn’t as far-gone as he seemed. Maybe the news would dislodge him from wherever his mind was stuck. “Bad news,” I answered Nadira.
“Z wants you back,” I continued, watching Abrami. “They know I’m not alone.”
“We should leave,” Nadira said. “Just pack up and disappear like we’ve done before.”
“Where would we go from here?” I glared at her. “Scorn is under interdict. None of us speak Russian. We hid in the camps as long as we could. Anarchy is as far away as we can get without living on an airless moon.”
“Unless we had the solars,” Abrami said as if my last sentence had remained unfinished. He was definitely back in the room.
I nodded. “I have a line on something I’ve been working since Liberty. A big strike if it pans out. Problem is, it’s still days away. And I need to monitor it which means stalling Gantt.”
“How exactly do we do that?” Nadira asked, the skepticism in her tone meaning she thought I meant it would be up to her. Not bloody likely.
“They might be looking for an action here,” I said. “Anarchy was always the golden target Z could never reach.”
“That’s suicide. It puts us all at risk. Why would you even consider it?” Nadira said, more a statement than a question.
“They know we need the solars,” Abrami mused, nodding. He turned back to Sara and the game.
“If I offer to do something for Gantt,” I explained to Nadira, “I might be able to find out what he’s up to. At a minimum, I can distract him and buy some time. If necessary, we can link up somewhere else.”
“For now, we play the spider,” Abrami said, sounding more like the man I knew on Darwin as he focused on the game. “We go on like nothing’s happened. Let them think we’re too scared to make a move. If they creep closer, we’ll spring the trap and slip out while no one’s looking. But first we need some solars.”
He looked up at Sara and said, “It’s your turn now, Jo.” With that, he manipulated the die-cube again and our conversation was over.
---
I didn’t know how serious Gantt was until the next shift. I’d followed Abrami’s advice and had taken the grav bike out to perform another survey, this time from a rock without much spin relative to my target. I needed more precise measurements to calculate its track.
Once you exit Anarchy proper, the world turns into a pinpricked dome of tiny, arc-welding lights ranging from faintly blue to reddish orange. But it was the shadows you had to worry about, the darkspace shifting across the field of stars. Unnoticed, one of those would kill you.
On the way out, I had time to think. The coldscape was dangerous that way. It lured you into self-absorbed distraction. No one should have been able to track us here. Someone must have tipped them off. Webb? One of the other refugees? It could have been Nadira but I didn’t think she’d put Sara at risk. Hard to know, but it was someone, not the records. Time on Darwin and Cooperation had taught me that in security humans were almost always the weakest link.
I was still rolling the problem through my mind when I began matching vector and spin with the asteroid I intended as my survey anchor. I had just executed the first maneuver when instead of seeing cold, shadowed rock in front of me, the stars began wheeling overhead. The grav bike’s console exploded with warning lights and alarms that formed only snapshots of impressions in amber and red, a micro-meteor impact, a fuel line rupture, a drive failure, cabin depressurization.
Stars pinwheeled overhead, the broken light and shadow creating an illusion of color as I engaged the emergency thrusters to compensate, hoping I would have enough fuel to crawl back to Anarchy. I didn’t have the solars to pay for a rescue or spare time to invest in indentured servitude to work off the debt. Relying on altruism wasn’t your first, best survival choice out on the Fringe.
The thrusters stabilized the grav bike just in time to bring the rock I’d been aiming for back into central view. A quick series of dodge maneuvers barely avoided a sudden deceleration. That burned through my remaining reserves and deep into the air that served double duty as redline emergency thruster fuel. I barely got the bike’s nose pointed back toward Anarchy before an oxygen alarm added to the cacophony of catastrophic failures.
I kicked in the soft suit’s emergency recycler and prayed to whatever gods would listen that I had enough momentum to make it home. By the time I saw the lights that marked Anarchy’s central landing bay hove into view, I was nearly a convert. I limped the bike into the airlock as the last of my oxygen bled away.
I entered the asteroid-colony with no iridium, no water, no lead, just a wrecked grav bike and a wasted day. I was lucky to have made it back at all. Webb said he’d perform a diagnostic autopsy to see what had caused the failure. Electromechanical problems were his responsibility; micro-meteors, ambushes, sabotage and operator error all came down to mine. I suspected I knew what he’d find. Someone had taken a shot at me. The damage was too precise. Even if it could be fixed easily, that was more solars we didn’t have. It wouldn’t take long before word of my personal financial disaster spread.
I settled my nerves in the Chaosium before I slunk back to the cubicle. I didn’t want to face Nadira’s questions about our liability for the bike. Or Abrami’s disappointment.
As I was on my second beer, Gantt slipped in beside me.
“If you’re here to check your handiwork,” I said, “you missed.”
“Mikey, Mikey.” He shook his head, smiling sardonically. “Have you thought about our offer?”
“Why are you so interested in Abrami?” I asked sullenly.
“He took something that didn’t belong to him.” Whose kid was Sara, I wondered? I couldn’t ask without showing Gantt my hand.
“Even if I knew where Abrami was,” I said, in no mood to dance, “he’s as close to family as I’ve got. You don’t sell out family even on the days you really want to.”
“We’re all family, Mikey, you, me, Abrami, Z. You wouldn’t be selling him out. Think of him as a runaway. You’d just be telling his family that he’s ok.”
“Because I know you only have my best interests at heart, right? Just like outside the airlock.” I glowered at him over my beer.
He changed tack. “What would these refugees think if they found out Sub-Commander Z was living beside them?” Gantt asked.
“But he’s not Sub-Commander Z,” I whispered. “We both know that.”
“They don’t know that,” Gantt said with a sweep of his arm across the bar. “That last video of you and him paints a picture everyone believes.”
I turned thoughtful for a moment as if considering his line of reasoning. “Probably the same thing they’d think of Z’s Enforcer recruiting operatives to make a statement. The Fringe worlds don’t like you very much. Something about taking away their toys.” Stalemate.
“Think about our offer, Mikey.” Gantt rose to leave. “After your mishap this morning, it’s likely the best one you get.”
I spared him the monologue about Abrami and I growing up together as castaway kids in the corporate hive of Cooperation. This wasn’t the first time we’d had to buy our air day to day. We’d escaped that. We’d live. “Don’t hold your breath, Gantt.”
“Speaking of breathing,” he said as he leaned back across the table, “we’ve bought out your O2 contract. You’re a bad risk now, Mikey. Get back to me in a few days on how your air’s holding out.”
---
When I got back to the cubicle, I found only Abrami and Sara. He had the die-cube out again. They were both staring intently at the hard suit’s datapad as if concentrating on a puzzle.
“Where’s Nadira?” I asked.
“She heard what happened in the coldscape,” Abrami said without looking up. “She went out to buy supplies while Jo and I play our game.” Great, completely checked out.
Nadira returned a few minutes later. “Well, I tried calling in all my favors. Whoever bought out our contract has it locked down tight. After your crack-up in the coldscape,” she glared at me, “we have no leverage.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said. “One of Gantt’s people must have been playing sniper somewhere I couldn’t see.”
“Well, if they did, no one else saw it either. Webb’s saying the bike got trashed by operator error. He logged it as ID-10-T.”
“Then Gantt must have sabotaged it in storage. He’s got deep pockets and a lot of connections. Z must have been busy while we’ve been away. But it sounds like she’s also taken a personal interest in reclaiming something of hers that went missing.” I glanced at Sara then stared at Abrami. He didn’t look up.
“Then we should blow him in for what he is and let Anarchy justice take care of the rest.” Nadira said.
“And as a parting gift,” I growled back at her, “he’ll ID both me and Abrami. That doesn’t sound like a brilliant plan to me.”
“No one’s seen Abrami and you’re dead anyway.” She sneered. “That’s what you’ve always said.”
“I’m only dead because people here don’t care if I’m alive. Everyone’s got a past they want to hide. That doesn’t extend to sheltering Butcher of Blind Mouth Bay. That video of the limo pegs him as Sub-Commander Z, a fact not lost on Gantt. You can bet if he uses it, you won’t last long either. Sara would be the only one of us to get out this, and who knows what would happen to her then.”
“Are the men coming to take me away again?” Sara asked, looking wide-eyed at Abrami.
“Shh.” Abrami lifted her chin and looked solemnly into her eyes. “No one’s going to take you away again, my angel. Don’t worry, Uncle Mike will keep us safe until I get you back to heaven.” I wasn’t sure whether Abrami was still here or back on Cooperation with Jo until I saw the warning in his eyes as he turned his gaze first to Nadira and then to me.
We started selling our equipment piece by piece, cutters, repair kits, mini-corers, sample testers, scanners, survey equipment, optics, everything but the hard suit which might pay passage off this rock. We saved the soft suits for last. They had their own recycling scrubbers, a dozen hours each. Plus we might need them for a working passage if we somehow broke Gantt’s grip. Spacers without suits were either paying passengers or frozen meat.
Each piece sold would be impossible to replace. With every solar we’d saved, we’d barely built up enough to eke out our survival. But we were dead on Anarchy now. The profits barely kept us breathing. Most of it was claimed by Webb as liability against the grav bike.
We only got the minimums for each piece anyway. Gantt was better connected than I’d thought possible for a Green on Anarchy. Ironically, it was the Green refugees who bought it up, the ones who had fled before our Revolution and still thought we were one of them. Even Gantt couldn’t prevent them from buying our equipment, but he could make it worth their while to pay nothing more than the price of their pity. Pity doesn’t go far on Anarchy. Two years of backbreaking work kept us breathing just under three more days.
In the meantime, I worked the hard suit as a mercenary to supplement our dwindling reserves. Without the grav bike contract, there was no other way to bring in the solars that we’d need. By then, the largesse of the micro-comet was receding to fantasy. I scraped up just enough on other miners’ defended claims to keep us not quite breathless.
Even then, supplies were spotty. The days I came up short, we got lethargic. By the end of the third day, the migraines had set in. Each shift I was out, we had Sara breathing through a different soft suit recycler. At night, she slept in the hard suit so only we adults would suffer. That meant a shortened shift each morning I went out, or cutting my reserve margins deep into the red. That was a dangerous proposition in the coldscape but I couldn’t watch Sara struggle. None of us could. She was the point of gravity that held us all together.
“Don’t worry, my little Saraphim,” Abrami would say to calm her each time we sealed her in, “we’ll get you safe to heaven soon.”
A couple days later even mercenary work dried up as Gantt’s choke hold constricted. He must have been burning through solars at an amazing rate. After the loss of Darwin, I didn’t think the Revolution was that well financed. He also must have been more subtle than I’d ever given him credit for. As LOW OrbIT and the Revolution had each learned a dozen times, Fringers detested being manipulated and would act contrary out of spite. But we were only salvage miners, Green refugees, not true Anarchists.
The next day, Abrami came up short of breath four times as he lay on his bunk. Nadira and I could only look at each other in silence and shame, and wonder if he was just the first. We both knew the calculations, without one of the adults we might hold out just long enough. But without Abrami, I wouldn’t have made it here. I owed him for saving my life on Darwin. Without his tending my wounds after we were ambushed, I wouldn’t be alive. So we dimmed the lights and cut our meals to starvation rations, devoting every solar saved to air. And still our throats tightened a little more each day.
As the recyclers in the soft suits burned out and we sold them one by one, Abrami started showing signs of waking up, as if the lack of oxygen had begun to clear his head. He became tactical again. He sent Nadira into the Chaosium to sow rumors against Gantt, the seeds of which I provided. I didn’t like relying on her, I didn’t trust her, but Abrami didn’t seem to have a problem. He carefully crafted a few stories of his own. We kept hoping the counter-pressure would ease Gantt’s stranglehold on us. They might have if we’d had enough time. We didn’t. Our air continued to bleed away.
With our equipment gone, we faced hard choices. Other than the hard suit, which Abrami insisted might still have a use, the only thing we had left was the system survey on the micro-comet. With no other equipment and Webb’s debt still unpaid on the grav bike, I knew there was no way we’d be able to profit from that knowledge before the micro-comet began falling toward the sun. Even then it only brought in enough solars to keep us alive another few days.
As the last of that air blackened into carbon and Nadira was out spreading rumors through Anarchy as far and wide as her legs, Abrami pulled me aside. He had slipped into a flashback to Cooperation, his almost hourly routine again. He pointed to Sara sleeping and started ranting how we had to save her from his mother no matter what the cost. I thought he’d finally slipped into an oxygen-deprivation psychosis.
Until I noticed his hands gliding through a set of security signals I hadn’t seen since Darwin. Subtle, shielded gestures that said first and foremost to keep my mouth firmly shut. We were running a two-tiered game of what we said and what we did, just like the old days on Cooperation. He brought me to his bunk where he’d laid out two devices I had no idea he’d had secreted in our quarters. The first was a compact cutter. It looked like he’d carved it out of a hard suit and given it a self-contained power supply. Instead of being a bulky industrial unit, this one was highly concealable. It wouldn’t have long-term staying power as a weapon but its one or two shots would pack one hell of a lethal punch. I pocketed it.
The second was a die-cube about two centimeters on a side, the one he was always using to play games with Sara, except now he showed me its true purpose. With the proper manipulation, it revealed itself as a custom-built combination bug detector, jammer and exterminator, much like the security wands we used on Darwin. In any of several detection modes, a scan would confirm a listening device’s existence without alerting it, along with capturing its mode, carrier frequency and bandwidth using a differential power analysis. In extermination mode, it overloaded the tiny devices with electromagnetic energy that little shielding could counter. These were standard issue for high level security personnel on Darwin. Abrami must have kept it hidden ever since we’d fled.
I had a rudimentary knowledge of how it operated. A quick glance told me it was set for extermination. That made it simple, just fire and forget. One tap and any electronic eyes and ears within ten meters would receive an LD-50 dose of microwave radiation. Within five meters that was closer to LD-100.
Abrami’s last signs were unmistakable. Find Gantt. End this before he does.
---
I left Abrami alone with Sara. I wondered how long he’d been running this game, if all of his flashbacks over the past year had been an act. I’m not sure which prospect scared me more.
I found Gantt waiting in the top level of the Chaosium, a smiling insect at the center of a web. Everyone cleared out as they saw me approach.
I slipped into a chair across from him without a word, set Abrami’s bug detector between us with my left hand and tapped it as a distraction. The cutter slipped into my right beneath the table. Cutters had a maximum focal length of just over two meters. Which made them ideal weapons in the closed environments of Anarchy.
I watched Gantt jump as I saw the cube’s display tag two, no three devices, one embedded beneath his skin. I almost thought I heard them pop like fleas caught in a microwave. I could smell the wrongness of burnt silicon mixed with a metallic trace of blood.
“Time to talk, Gantt,” I said. I saw him twitch as if considering whether to respond with violence.
“I’ve got a cutter under the table,” I continued, “aimed for a strategic arterial junction you like to call Little Yevgeny. So sit back with your hands visible and answer some questions. Unless you want to end your days the ball-less bitch I know you to be.”
Slowly, Gantt laid his hands on the table. “That thing mean we’re private?” He flicked a finger toward the security cube. I nodded.
He sighed, almost resigned. “It won’t take them long to notice, Mikey. The meter’s running so you better make it quick.” Not quite the response I was expecting.
“Who’s they, Z’s people?”
Gantt shook his head. “Some guy named Michaels. LOW OrbIT spook. They rolled us up before we linked up with Z for the evac. She set us all up and left us drifting in the cold. After the Sky Cells, this guy snatched us and said coming up with Abrami was the only way to keep from going Terminal.”
I almost burned him right then. One press of the trigger and his crotch and half his leg would have boiled away. But that would only attract attention and wouldn’t change a thing.
Instead I asked, “How’s the girl fit into this? Whose kid is she anyway?”
“The girl’s just leverage. The meeting you were headed to that day on Darwin was an evac, the real one for the inner cadre. Abrami must have thought it was a setup and stolen the girl from Z as insurance. Or maybe she’s his daughter, I don’t know. Either way, you’re the ultimate loose end on both sides now. It took a while, but once we established contact with the woman, it was almost too easy.”
Nadira. I shot to my feet and snatched the cube from the center of the table, the cutter now naked in my hand and pointed at his chest.
“It’s too late, Mikey. They’re already on the move.” Gantt had a particular look in his eyes, one I recognized. Not quite desperation, but one that said he was lying. And that he knew that I knew he was. He was tipping me off in case someone was still listening.
“How long ago?” I gestured with the cutter.
“Fifteen minutes.”
That’s how long I had before they got there. He’d just given me my lead-time as a gift. I might just make it back to the cubicle before they did.
“You move from this spot and I’ll personally see you outted. They’ll coldscape you and use you for target practice before you die.” A hollow threat that I hoped might cover him in case his paranoia was right. I owed him that but no more.
When I got back to the cubicle, no one was in sight, Abrami, Sara, Nadira. The room was as clean as if none of them had ever existed. I could feel the difference immediately. There was plenty of oxygen in the air without them. The scrubbers must have caught up. In fact I felt a little giddy after going so long without.
The hard suit was still in the corner, the sun shield set to mirror mode. A gift for me or hadn’t they had time to take it with them? Had Nadira even made it back?
When I cleared the visor, I discovered that she had. She was in the suit, her face as serene as Sara’s when she was sleeping. A blue-tinged angel, as peaceful as I’d never seen her in life, just a trickle of blood clotting in the hair behind her ear. Colder than the coldscape.
Nadira no longer mattered. But had she already sold us out?
I didn’t wait to find out. I packed my trash quickly, not concerned with an antiseptic cleaning. Gantt’s people already knew where to find me. But I still had five minutes if I believed him. I had no solars so I needed a few things to make it off this rock. Maybe Abrami had left me something. If nothing else, I could trade the hard suit with the keycard for the door.
I had no idea where Abrami would go from here. That had probably been a part of his plan all along. Perhaps it was for the best. I’d never wanted his revolution anyway. I never really understood it. I stuck with it to help my friend who was gone now. All I’d ever really wanted was to live where some corporation didn’t own the air I breathed. Abrami said everyone deserved the same. And I believed him.
I had just finished gathering up the essentials when I began to feel lightheaded. A glance at the atmospheric panel by the door showed the scrubbers were back offline. Several levels had climbed into amber bordering on red, including eventually lethal contaminants. The alarms were still disabled.
I held my breath and struggled to hold the cutter as I stumbled toward the door. Nadira’s betrayal was complete. In the suit she continued smiling enigmatically, like that painting back on Earth. Soon, I was on the floor, the room spinning around me, the cutter slipping from my grip.
Two men in breather masks entered, passing through our security as if it were a throwaway account. Trails of light lingered behind them as if I’d become as unstuck in time as Abrami had pretended. Freeze-frames and ghost images stuttered to catch up as my eyes refused to focus.
These weren’t Gantt’s people. They were too efficient, too professional, too military. With a quick kick, the cutter was a distant dream. As I lay spasming on the floor like a landed fish, one administered a shot, a pinprick that brought dark, involuntary dreams. My heartbeat slowed and each breath became a nightmare of pneumonia.
They loaded me into a cryo-transport. Wherever they were taking me, I’d make the journey not as a person but as anonymous frozen meat.
As they closed the lid, my world faded to dreamless black. But as the last seam of light dimmed into the coldscape of cryogenic storage, at least I knew I’d escaped my past for a little while to a place where the air I breathed was mine. If they ever awakened me, I knew it never would be again.
© 2011 Edward P. Morgan III
