Stolen Earth E-Book

J.T. Nicholas

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 534

Beschreibung

Firefly meets The Expanse in a future where humanity has destroyed the Earth through ecological disaster and warfare, and a totalitarian state prevents any access to their home...Environmental disasters and uncontrolled AI armies have caused the human population of Earth to flee. They lie scattered across innumerable space stations and colonies, overcrowded and suffering. The Earth is cut off by the Interdiction Zone: a network of satellites to prevent anything getting into or out of the planet. The incredible cost of maintaining it has crippled humanity, who struggle under the totalitarian yoke of the Sol Commonwealth government, whose rich grow richer while the poor are on the brink of starvation.Many have been driven to the edge of society, yearning for freedom and taking any work offered, criminal and otherwise, in order to survive. The crew of the Arcus are just such people.A client has come to the table claiming to have the codes necessary to penetrate the Interdiction Zone. Once through, a world of priceless artifacts awaits, provided anyone crazy enough to make the run can be found.  They've all heard the rumors – ships that have set down, pilfered the ruins of a museum or private collection, and escaped with enough priceless works to retire.  Arcus Captain Lynch knows better – he's been on-world before, a brief and harrowing experience that he's in no hurry to relive.  But fuel is running low and cred accounts even lower, and the Arcus' survival might depend on taking the job.Yet on arrival on Earth, the crew discovers that what remains on their world is not as they have been told, and the secrets they find are big enough to bring the entire Sol Commonwealth tumbling down…

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also available from J.T. Nicholas and Titan Books

Title Page

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Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also available from J.T. Nicholas and Titan Books

Re-Coil

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Stolen Earth

Print edition ISBN: 9781789093155

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789093162

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London, SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: September 2021

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© 2021 J.T. Nicholas

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

For Julie. More than a decade in, and I still can’t believewe get to do this for a living.

PROLOGUE

“Grayson Lynch, pay attention!”

The words were followed by a tiny jolt of electricity as the instructor routed a surge of power through his station. Gray winced at the shock, the voltage just high enough to register as pain but the current too low to do any actual harm. The sting faded almost as soon as he felt it, a corporeal reminder that paying attention was not optional.

“Yes, Ms. Mason.” He straightened on his seat. Not that any of the students aboard Odyssey station rated a real seat. Gray and the sixty-four students in his class half-stood, half-crouched atop bicycle-style saddles built into their student workstations. That workstation consisted of a conductive metal frame, the narrow ledge on which one could perch to take some of the pressure off their legs, but never truly sit, and a pair of articulated arms that held the data screen and interface devices. Each station took up about a third of the space of the traditional desks that they had learned students had once used, which allowed all of them to fit within the tight confines of the classroom compartment.

“Does the history of Old Earth bore you, Mr. Lynch?” the teacher asked. She wore the severe pale-blue ship suit of Education and Assessment, the division of Sol Commonwealth bureaucracy responsible for educating the youth and placing them in their ultimate career fields. The division was rumored to be responsible for less savory duties as well; even adults trod carefully when a teacher was in earshot. Given Ms. Mason’s temperament, Gray was ready to believe just about anything.

“No, ma’am,” he said. The history of Old Earth fascinated him. He cared about it far more than he did about the mechanics of the End. The idea that whole generations of people were born at the bottom of a gravity well and lived their lives without worrying about O2 rations or waste recycling was like some sort of fantastical dream straight out of the vids. To him, it seemed an existence without boundaries, the kind that couldn’t be further from the realities of living in space.

The kind of existence he and probably everyone else in the Commonwealth wished they had.

“Very good. You may be reporting for assessment and placement soon, Mr. Lynch, but do remember that your evaluation is still ongoing. Now, please describe to us the factors that led to the End.”

Gray winced, even as he stood taller in his station. Assessment and placement: the words carried a near-crippling amount of anxiety for every youth in the Sol Commonwealth. His career trajectory—in reality, the trajectory of his entire life—would be determined in the upcoming weeks. The A&P board would review each student, their performance, their attitude, their compliance and loyalty, and in each case, they would make a determination.

Whatever A&P decided, he had little choice in the matter. SolComm would place him at the intersection of his perceived abilities and their own current needs. At that point, he had three choices: accept the job he was offered, decide instead to become one of the unskilled laborers who toiled for few credits and with little chance of advancement in the belt or the bowels of various moons, or flee to the Fringe, where neither SolComm nor anyone else cared if your air was breathable or if you had enough calories to survive. On the Fringe, you carved out your own existence, but it was a life with no guarantees.

“We’re waiting, Mr. Lynch.”

He swallowed, moistening his dry mouth, and cleared his throat. It was a basic question, one that even an elementary student would have been able to answer, but then, the elementary student would have plenty of time to make up for any failures. With A&P coming up, he couldn’t afford any mistakes. “The End,” he began, “refers to the period of Old Earth in the late twenty-second century, according to the most accepted Old Earth calendar, before the precursor to the Sol Commonwealth was forced to evacuate as many humans from the planet’s surface as possible.”

“Yes, Mr. Lynch, we all know that. So does any grade-schooler.” There were a few chuckles at that from some of the other students and Gray felt his face flush. “But what caused the End?”

He stumbled some over the response. “A… combination of resource mismanagement, natural disasters, ecological decay, and the resultant arms race between nations as they fought over resource scarcity.” He tried to keep the uncertainty—and the embarrassment—out of his voice. “The causes of most human conflict can be traced to resource scarcity.” His teacher was still looking at him expectantly, so he added, “The thing about the End was that the scarcity could have been avoided with better environmental control measures. Old Earth had excess capacity to see to the needs and comforts of everyone, but the distribution of those resources and the decline of the environments that produced them prevented the necessary efficiencies from taking hold.”

“An interesting hypothesis,” Ms. Mason allowed.

“What about the AIs?” someone—Gray thought it was Marie Colbert, always trying to one-up him—called from the front of the room. “Ultimately, it was the Six that drove people off Old Earth. Sure, the factors Gray mentioned were present, but the real downfall of humanity was unfettered artificial intelligence.”

“A rebuttal, Mr. Lynch?” Ms. Mason arched one eyebrow at him.

Gray’s palms grew hot. Marie wasn’t wrong; the AIs were part of it. But it was resource scarcity and environmental mismanagement that had led to them in the first place. He attempted to gather his thoughts and form a cogent reply. Ms. Mason’s request wasn’t as idle as it seemed, not with the A&P board just around the corner.

“The AIs were the culmination of the arms race that grew out of the scarcity,” he replied. “As weapons systems grew more advanced, it was no longer possible for human reactions to defend against them, so the first of the unfettered AIs was brought online.”

“A moment,” Ms. Mason said, interrupting Gray just as he was starting to get traction. “Mr. Tran,” she said, calling a student’s name seemingly at random. “Please tell us the difference between fettered and unfettered artificial intelligences.”

“Fettered artificial intelligences aren’t capable of true awareness,” Tran replied, parroting the textbook near verbatim. Show-off. “They employ incredibly complex decision matrixes with some level of heuristic capability, but any possibility of actual cognizance is mitigated by extensive conditional controls. Unfettered artificial intelligences lack those controls. Not only can they analyze data and make decisions in fractional microseconds, but they have some measure of self-awareness as entities separate from a collection of microchips.”

“And let us not forget, they are banned throughout the Commonwealth,” Ms. Mason noted. “On penalty of death. Mx. Cassidy, how would you further illuminate Mr. Tran’s categorization of unfettered versus fettered AIs?”

“Um…” There was a pause as another student was put on the spot.

The pressure in Gray’s chest eased and he surreptitiously rubbed his hands together, trying to dry the sweat that slicked them. He felt a pang of sympathy for his classmates, but if Ms. Mason’s attention had been diverted, maybe he was off the hook.

“Fettered intelligences are sentient, capable of sensing and understanding the world around them and reacting to it, but only within their defined parameters. Unfettered intelligences are conscious, not only aware of the external world, but possessing an internal world as well, and can go beyond the defined parameters of their programming.” Cassidy spoke slowly but Gray had to nod at the words. It was a better explanation than the one they had gotten in class.

“Very well put, Mx. Cassidy. It’s nice to see that someone has been paying attention.” There were a few more chuckles at that, and Gray started to relax. It didn’t last. “Now, I believe Mr. Lynch was just about to tell us why AIs played a major role in the downfall of Old Earth.”

Gray drew a slow breath, his confidence growing. He knew this part. “The first AI platforms brought online by the Old Earth national militaries began as defensive constructs. But when war broke out between the two superpowers at the time, they were quickly shifted to cover more offensive capabilities. To keep up with the rapidly changing battlefield environment, the various polities were forced to remove all constraints, essentially unfettering the AIs and turning over full military control and weapons development to them. As a result, AI-developed weaponry skewed toward efficiencies that the world wasn’t prepared for.”

“What kind of efficiencies, Mr. Lynch?”

“Nano-engineered viruses. Gene-targeted micro drones. Mechano-chemical agents designed to destroy infrastructure or crops. Basically, a wide array of non-conventional armaments that had previously been banned by international conventions and were far less discriminating than their conventional-warfare counterparts.”

“And why did this lead to the End?” Ms. Mason pressed. “Why didn’t it simply result in victory for one side or the other, as conflicts had for millennia before?”

Gray felt a little surge of panic as he racked his brain for the answer. They had learned of the escalation in both rhetoric and force that had triggered the initial conflict; they had studied the development of the AI-driven weapons systems and their devastating impact on not only the population, but also the infrastructure; they had researched in great detail the Herculean efforts of the spacers at the time—those who would become the founding members of the Sol Commonwealth—to evacuate as much of Old Earth’s population as possible and to find livable space, food, water, and oxygen enough to keep them all alive. But had they ever really been told why the war on Old Earth had ended the way that it had?

“Because,” he said slowly, buying time as he drew out the word. “Because with the AI unfettered, there was no one, no human, I mean, with the power to stop things?” His rising pitch turned his statement into a question before he could stop it. Still, Ms. Mason was nodding slightly, so Gray forged ahead. “The Six—the unfettered artificial intelligences in control of the most powerful military alliances—controlled the only systems that could be used to stand in their way.” He shrugged. “They had all the guns, so by the time humanity realized they needed to do something about it, they no longer had the means to do so.”

“It was a bit more complicated than that,” Ms. Mason said, and Gray flushed. “But,” she added, “your assessment is largely correct.” Gray sighed as the tightness in his chest finally released fully and he drew his first deep breath in what felt like hours. He caught a flicker of light and saw that the question indicator on one of his classmate’s workstations had lit up.

“A question, Ms. Pickett?” the teacher asked.

“What about the Interdiction Zone? And the space-bound forces of the various polities? If humanity didn’t have any weapons—under their control, I mean—then how were we able to cut off Old Earth and protect the Commonwealth?”

Gray tried to focus on the answer, or at least pay enough attention to avoid the inevitable shock. But his mind drifted to the A&P board. Because there were so many students to assess, there was no set time for each individual evaluation. His name would be called whenever the board was ready for him, and at that moment, his adolescence would effectively end.

The waiting filled him with a sense of dread that dried his mouth and made him want to flinch at every sudden sound. But with no control over when he’d be called, all Gray could do was wait.

*   *   *

“Grayson Lynch.”

Gray was out of his chair—an actual molded composite construction—before the last syllable from the comm system had quieted.

“Here.” He took the two long steps necessary to cross the small waiting room to the desk, behind which sat a middle-aged man wearing the same pale blue as his instructors.

The man behind the desk held out a biometric scanner and Gray pressed his palm to it. There was the faint sense of cold and then a slight sting. The device simultaneously verified his identity and acted as a de facto medical exam, communicating with the scanners built into his clothing to verify things like blood pressure, blood oxygenation, temperature, heart rate and more. He’d heard that the stations where the highest politicians and wealthiest citizens lived scanned you only on entry, but aboard Odyssey, that kind of privacy was a luxury that few could afford.

The scanner beeped and the man at the desk pressed a button. A compartment behind him and to the right slid open. “Through there,” he said.

Gray nodded his thanks and stepped through the hatch.

Like most of the compartments aboard Odyssey, the room beyond was small, maybe three meters square. It held little more than one long table, running most of the length of the room with a single chair set before that table. Two women and one man sat behind the table, all clad in the pale blue of Education and Assessment. Gray was growing to hate the color.

“Mr. Lynch.” The woman who spoke was old enough to have some silver showing at the temples, but her face was unlined. “Please sit while we review your file.”

Gray sat. He wasn’t sure what there was to review, or why they hadn’t already reviewed it. They were the ones that had called him in here. Was the vaunted process of assessment and placement really so slipshod as to be decided in the next fifteen or twenty minutes while they pored over their data pads? Surely they had given his future more consideration than that?

The minutes ticked by. The three assessors weren’t even talking to each other. This went on for nearly twenty minutes until, as if at some unspoken symbol, the three put their heads together and held a brief—very brief—whispered conversation. Then the woman, the one who had initially greeted him, spoke.

“Mr. Lynch,” she said, “we are pleased to offer you entry into the Sol Commonwealth Navy. Your grades are sufficient, and your instructors have noted that you express more interest in military history than in any of your other subjects.”

He had? That was news to him.

The woman continued, “We have found that such interests are best put to use patrolling Old Earth to ensure no artificial intelligences escape the Interdiction Zone.”

He opened his mouth, closed it again, but couldn’t form any words.

“You can, of course, choose to opt out of this assignment. In doing so, you will then be reassigned to service on—” she paused, looking down at her data pad—“Mimas.” She offered a tight, professional smile. “I would not recommend that option.”

Gray’s mind spun. Mimas? That was a moon of Saturn, one of eighty or so moons that SolComm exploited for their natural resources. The only things there were mines; mines that still relied on a lot of manual labor to run the drills and haul the waste rock. His choices were the navy or the mines? Decision time was upon him—he’d known it was coming for some time—but expecting a choice and having to choose right now weren’t the same.

“I…”

“We understand that this feels like a momentous decision.” The administrator’s tone was flat, compassionless. She probably said them a dozen times a day. Gray realized that she probably did exactly that. “But it is not. You have been offered a rare opportunity, Mr. Lynch. I understand that your parents both work in Environmental here on the station. SolCommNav will afford you the opportunity for many creature comforts that your parents lack and which the mines of Mimas certainly could not provide.” She offered another smile, this one with the barest hint of actual warmth. “I understand that admirals even get real meat from time to time.” Then she was back to cool professionalism. “But regardless of that, we have more assessments to do today. We need your decision. Now, Mr. Lynch.”

What choice—what real choice—did he have? He wasn’t going to choose to live on an airless rock with minimal gravity and nothing but hard labor and privation to look forward to. “The navy,” he said. He forced some enthusiasm into his voice.

“Excellent choice, Mr. Lynch. The orders have been issued. Report to Docking Bay 6 at 06:00 tomorrow morning. The freighter Hope Springs will be departing at 06:30. It will take you to the SolCommNav training center on Luna and from there you will be in the hands of SolCommNav rather than Education and Assessment. Welcome to adulthood, Mr. Lynch.”

*   *   *

“The navy? That’s fantastic! Congratulations, son!”

His father’s rough embrace surprised Gray. He’d never been one for physical affection and Gray found it simultaneously comforting and awkward. He returned the embrace for a moment and then they both stepped back.

“But do you really have to leave so soon?” his mother asked, a catch of worry in her voice.

“I’m afraid so,” Gray replied. “I don’t think I want to find out what happens if I’m late reporting to Luna.”

“The navy,” his father said again, wistfulness in his voice. “I hear officers are allowed to have more than one kid.”

Gray blinked at that. He knew that the sole reason he had no brothers or sisters was because of the regulations that SolComm instituted on every station and most of the colonies. Contracted couples were allowed one child. Anything more required approval from station control and proof of means to provide for the additional calories and oxygen. But he’d never really considered it one way or another for himself. Fatherhood, contracting—it seemed so far away.

“Well, if we only have tonight, then we should make the most of it,” his mother said. “I think we can afford to go hungry for a couple of days to have a bit of a feast and make sure we send you off right.”

“That sounds like a fantastic idea,” Gray’s father said. “And I’ve been saving up alcohol rations for months. I’ll pop out to the commissary and pick us up a few things.”

“Gray, why don’t you comm some of your friends?” His mother surveyed the living compartment. “If we move the furniture around a bit, we can fit two or three more in here. And if your father is willing to convert some of those saved alcohol rations to calories, we’ll have plenty of food.”

“Yes, Mother.” Gray felt a strange blend of joy and sadness. It had cost his parents dear to save those rations and their willingness to use them to give him a memorable last evening on Odyssey filled him with a mix of pride and gratitude and love. But in all his years, he had never seen a SolCommNav vessel put in at Odyssey. He had only the vaguest idea of how naval leave might work, but he suspected that it would be a long time, a very long time, before he saw his parents in the flesh again.

GRAY

“Three minutes to sensor range.”

“Acknowledged,” Gray replied.

“Weapons are hot,” Leo added from his station.

Between the big mercenary on the guns, Rajani Hayer at the comm, and Gray himself in the pilot’s chair, the little bridge of the Arcus felt crowded. Not that that was a new feeling for any of them. The people who had fled the war that consumed Old Earth had had no choice but to adjust to the idea of living cheek by jowl with their fellows. For all the vast emptiness of space, the realities of living in it belied the name.

“Let’s hope we don’t need them,” Gray added. He keyed the comm, opening a channel to the rest of the ship. “Three minutes until sensor range,” he repeated.

“Roger that, Cap,” Bishop’s voice came back at once. He could hear the smile in the mechanic’s voice. They were low on calories, low on fuel, and, despite Federov’s assurance that the weapons were ready, they didn’t have nearly enough ammunition left to fight even a modest engagement. Still, nothing seemed to break Bishop’s irrepressible happiness. It was a rare thing, out among the stars. From what Gray could tell, optimists had been in short supply even before the End. Since SolComm abandoned Old Earth to its self-inflicted fate, they’d been a breed on the brink of extinction. “Power’s holding steady, and this old rust bucket’s still got enough fuel in the tanks to get us there and back again. Just like that time off Callisto.”

Callisto had been the first real job the Arcus had undertaken, nearly five years ago. It had been Gray and Bishop alone on that run, and while they had—just—made it back to port for refueling, the ship had drifted into dock on vapors and they’d both waited impatiently in the airlock for the blast of station-fed oxygen that purged the fouled air of the ship. It wasn’t really an experience he cared to repeat. But they had made it back. “Understood, Bishop. You ready, Morales?”

“Ready,” came the terse reply from the station security specialist.

Gray heard the tension there, but now wasn’t the time to deal with it. If the interception went smoothly, they wouldn’t have to fire a shot, and Bishop and Federov would be able to join Morales before making contact with any of the freighter’s crew while he and Hayer stayed at their stations ready to get them all out of dodge if things went sideways. He gave a mental snort as his own internal phrasing. They weren’t intercepting anything. That was a legacy from his time in the navy. SolCommNav did interceptions. What the Arcus was about to do was piracy.

Laurel Morales would be the first aboard their target vessel and she would have to establish command and control with the minimum level of violence necessary to get the job done. Her background in station security helped with that; she was used to asserting dominance and gaining compliance. It was still a daunting task, and the most dangerous moment in the mission. Gray trusted Morales, but that didn’t stop him from worrying.

Despite the months she’d been with them, Gray was still figuring their security specialist out; she hadn’t integrated fully with the rest of the crew, and that bothered him. She spent most of her time in her quarters, rarely joining them for meals and while she was quick with a smile and affable greeting, she hadn’t opened up to any of the others. She’d been standoffish enough that the rest of the crew no longer made the effort to invite her to a card game or to watch the trids or any of the other things they did to pass the hours in the long days spent in deep space. One of his many duties as captain was to forge a disparate group of people into a single, effective entity—a family, after a fashion. Morales hadn’t gotten there, yet. She was effective, efficient, and did everything asked of her and then some. But she rebuffed the rest of the crew enough that they had stopped reaching out.

That was a problem.

But, Gray thought, it was a problem for another time. He needed to be concentrating on the issue before them. That issue, now entering sensor range, was a Comet-class light freighter operated by Kiteva-Shao Consolidated. KSC wasn’t one of the really big boys, but they had the credits to pay off the right people to get the valuable contracts and were “politically active” enough to provide them with a measure of protection based more on fear of reprisals than strength of arms. They were also small enough to be more responsive to market forces than the larger mega-corps. Taken together, that meant they ended up with some of the most lucrative cargoes around.

Cargo that Gray intended to liberate.

“They’ve seen us,” Hayer said from her station.

“Begin your attack,” Gray replied.

“It’s not an attack,” Hayer muttered under her breath, even as she started tapping at the console before her. Gray ignored that; whatever Hayer might think, the electronic assault she was launching was absolutely an attack. One that, when he was a captain of a naval warship instead of an “independent freighter” like the Arcus, he would have responded to with a barrage of missile and beam weaponry fire.

Unless, of course, it had been a SolComm-sanctioned vessel launching the attack. The Commonwealth operated on a “do as I say” model seasoned with a hearty sprinkle of alles verboten. It had taken years for Gray to fully grasp just how far the corruption went; by the time he had, he’d been in so deep that to get out, he’d had to walk away from every comfort and relationship he had built over a twenty-year career.

He had no regrets.

“Done,” Hayer said with satisfaction. “Their comms are disabled, their sensors scrambled, and I’ve got them locked out of their weapons. They weren’t even using military-grade encryption.” She shook her head. “It’s like they’re asking for trouble.”

“Who in their right mind would try to hijack a SolComm-sanctioned cargo this far from the Fringe?” Gray replied, throwing a grin over his shoulder. “They probably didn’t think heightened security was necessary.”

“Stupid,” Federov said succinctly. “If weapons are locked down, I go help Morales.”

“Go,” Gray agreed. “If we have to shoot them at this point, I can do it from here.” They had been running silent, keeping their emissions signature to a minimum, allowing the KSC vessel to get close enough that they wouldn’t have to chase it. The ambush had been carefully planned, leveraging the shipping routes that Hayer had “acquired” from the KSC databanks and cross-referenced against all the available traffic patterns in the area. Space was tough to live in, but it was still pretty damn big. If everything went according to plan, they’d have a nice long window without having to worry about inconveniences like witnesses or SolCommNav ships stumbling onto their act of piracy.

Gray brought everything to full power, a rising crescendo of electromagnetic emissions that would be impossible to miss. Even with its sensors scrambled, the target vessel would know they were there, but it shouldn’t be able to get a clean read on the ship. If Hayer had done her job right—and Gray had no doubt that the academic-turned-outlaw had—the Arcus could have been any class of ship in the solar system as far as the KSV freighter was concerned. He keyed the comm again, this time hailing their target.

“KSC vessel,” he said in his best officious SolCommNav voice, “this is the SolComm Customs cutter Challenge. We have received information that you are carrying contraband cargo. You will be boarded and searched. Depower your engines and maintain a constant relative velocity. Resistance will be seen as an admission of guilt and your vessel—and your lives—will be forfeit.”

The script wasn’t perfect. Gray had worked some interdiction duty in SolCommNav, but the naval version varied from the commercial trade version. It didn’t matter, though; he was confident it was close enough to get the point across. The fact that customs and the navy both could and would destroy a vessel for failure to comply was all the motivation most corporate captains needed. Cooperate or perish. It was practically the unofficial Commonwealth motto.

“Understood, Challenge.” The reply came back after only a few heartbeats, long enough for Gray to line up the Arcus with an intersect vector and throttle up the engines. There was little sense of motion as the ship accelerated; the Arcus inertial dampeners compensated for the thrust.

“We assure you that our cargo is all properly documented and accounted for. This must be some sort of misunderstanding,” the KSC comm officer continued.

“That is for us to determine.” Gray abruptly cut the channel.

“That wasn’t very nice,” Hayer said. “You’re going to cause a panic over there.”

Gray shrugged. “Maybe. But I’d rather have them panicking to prepare for an inspection than to repel boarders. When SolComm comes knocking, people tend to go to great efforts to hide things like weapons. Makes it a lot harder to defend the ship if you just stuffed all your guns in your sock locker.”

Hayer just shook her head.

It took only a few minutes for the rapidly accelerating Arcus to catch up to the KSC vessel. Gray laid his ship alongside the target without difficulty, matching velocities so that the two vessels were stationary relative to one another despite continuing to rocket through objective space.

Gray finagled the controls, moving the ship closer to the extended docking tube until he felt the barely perceptible bump of contact. He waited a moment for the indicator lights on his pressure and atmosphere monitors to show green, then keyed the internal comm.

“All green up here, Morales. Execute when ready.”

LAUREL

Laurel Morales was not a fan of the plan.

Piracy went against everything she’d been brought up to believe in; she came from a strict law-and-order background and the simple act of taking something that didn’t belong to her was anathema to her being. The idea that people—innocent people—could get hurt in the process just made it all the worse. To say nothing of the fact that she was about to partake in the kind of activity that she had been trained by the best in the business to put a stop to. For her entire professional career, her job had been putting criminals away; now she found herself working side by side with them.

And there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. At this point, the best she could manage was to try to make sure that nobody got hurt.

But that didn’t mean she had to like it.

“Relax, Morales,” Federov said. “Will be cake. These corporate types do not understand real violence. They have too many ties with bureaucracy; they think they’re untouchable. We show them otherwise, hey?” He offered a grin, lending a jovial caste to his normally dour visage.

Laurel sighed. Federov was exactly the kind of criminal that annoyed her the most. He was violence for hire, a man who earned his living by virtue of his fists or his guns. And yet, he claimed that it was the evils of “the system” that drove him to the life. Which, conveniently enough, gave him all the permission he needed for the moral gymnastics that let him take whatever he wanted, so long as it was from “the man.” The evil, faceless SolComm system—as if the entity that had formed when millions of refuges were rescued from Old Earth during the End and absorbed into the existing networks of colonies, deep space stations, and nomadic space caravans were actually some malicious conspiracy out to subjugate humankind. It was well documented that the life of every spacer had gotten worse when the refugees from Old Earth had been absorbed; already limited resources had been stretched to the breaking point. But that didn’t stop the fledgling proto-SolComm from taking in every last person they possibly could and saving countless lives. How could a system that produced that be bad?

Not, she admitted, that SolComm was perfect. She wouldn’t be out on the Fringe if it were. The system—like every system—had its flaws. But if there was something amiss in the ship you were aboard, you didn’t blow it out from under you. You worked to fix the problem, while trying to keep everything else functioning and stable. Anything else was suicide.

Or, in the cases of people like Federov, maybe it was more akin to murder. But she had a job to do, and that meant keeping Lynch, Federov, and the rest of the crew of the Arcus happy. She just needed a way to do it without anyone getting hurt.

“No violence unless absolutely necessary,” she said. “We need this to be quick and clean.” Federov gave her a vague wave that could have indicated agreement or dismissal and she ground her teeth in frustration. She was about to speak again, but she heard the slap of feet on the ship’s deck and looked up in time to see the ship’s mechanic, Bishop, sprinting to join them.

She nodded to Bishop as he skidded to a halt, slightly out of breath from his run from the engineering section of the ship. Like her and Federov, he wore an unadorned ship suit, the one-piece garment that served as both uniform and extra-vehicular activity suit aboard most vessels. He also carried a boarding shotgun, holding it with a degree of confidence that at least suggested competence.

“Whew,” he panted. “Didn’t think I was going to make it in time. Engineering’s buttoned up and Cap’s got everything handled on the bridge.” He offered a broad grin that somehow managed to be contagious despite the job they were about to do. “Guess he saved all the hard work for his most talented folks.”

“Smartest and prettiest ones, too,” Federov added, tossing his head as if to send flowing locks of hair cascading over his shoulders. It looked ridiculous, given the near-shaven coif that he preferred.

“Ain’t it the truth, though,” Bishop grinned, adjusting the set of his shotgun.

“We’ve got a job to do, so let’s get to it,” Laurel interjected, cutting off their antics. She couldn’t help but smile slightly at Bishop. Most of the engineers she’d met in her years in SolComm had been humorless analytical types. Bishop hadn’t come up through the formal channels within the Commonwealth, though. He’d cut his teeth on his family’s mining trade. Maybe it was the education process in SolComm that left so many of the engineers she’d met in the past cold and dour.

Ship suits came standard with retractable helmets, and now she depressed a button on her wrist to deploy hers. It blossomed out from its storage compartment at the back of her neck and slid over her head and down her face. She set the face shield to opaque, masking her features from any would-be observers. Not that they were her features, at least not the ones she’d been issued at birth, but she had to keep playing the game.

Federov and Bishop followed suit, their helmets sliding from the respective receptacles to cover their faces. Federov did a quick weapons check. Like Bishop, he was armed with a boarding shotgun, the comparatively low-velocity, high-energy slugs running a lower risk of over-penetrating and punching through the hull of a station or ship. Laurel was content with her sidearm. Their unadorned ship suits and weapons loadout might have passed the most cursory of glances, but Laurel had no illusions that their disguises would hold up to more than a few seconds of scrutiny. Which meant that once the airlock opened, they had to act fast.

“All green up here, Morales. Execute when ready.”

The captain’s words sounded loud and clear from the integrated comm in her ship suit. She glanced at the indicator next to the airlock—seal and pressure were both reading green—to confirm the accuracy of the bridge reading. She sent back a double-click of acknowledgment to the captain and turned her attention back to Federov and Bishop.

“Quick and clean,” she reiterated. “And no one gets hurt.” Bishop nodded, tightening his hands on his shotgun as the tension of their impending action quelled some of his ebullience.

Federov clapped him on the shoulder. “Now the fun starts.” The dead serious tone belied the words, but he gave Laurel a nod.

She drew a breath, squared her shoulders, and hit the button to open the airlock. The outer door cycled, and she stepped in, followed closely by Federov and Bishop. It was a tight fit; the Arcus wasn’t a particularly large vessel to begin with and its primary airlock was actually its cargo hold, designed to be loaded or unloaded under vacuum. The airlock they were using was only suited for single-person transfers, but the three of them managed to squeeze into the space with enough room for her to tap the controls to cycle the lock. Once the indicator above the outer door showed a positive seal on the inner, Laurel punched the controls, causing the outer door to recede into the hull.

That left her looking down the throat of the KSC vessel’s docking tube, an otherwise nondescript cylinder of metal and composite. She could see the outer airlock of the ship at the other end of the tube, roughly ten meters away. As she reached out to grab on to the guide rail, she tried to force the thought that a single shift in acceleration by either vessel would result in the docking tube being torn free and her, Bishop, and Federov going for the kind of deep-space swim that every member of the Commonwealth secretly feared.

She drew a steadying breath and pulled herself forward.

The artificial gravity of the Arcus vanished the moment she broke the plane of the ship’s hull and she felt the instant disorientation of freefall. She ignored it as best she could and focused on the door to the KSC ship. She pulled herself hand-over-hand along the guiderail, each movement slow and steady in recognition of the laws of the physics. She was aware of Federov moving into the tube behind her and Bishop bringing up the rear, but she kept her focus forward. She’d done extensive extravehicular activity training as part of her “station security” work, but she’d never enjoyed it.

In short order, she found herself at the hull of the target vessel. She glanced back, waiting until both Federov and Bishop had reached her. When they were within arm’s reach, she hit the exterior controls, sending the request to the bridge to open the outer airlock. She felt the tension in her shoulders as she waited. If the KSC captain got spooked or if they really were carrying contraband and decided to make a break for it, now would be the time to do so. As soon as they let the “customs agents” on board, their window of escape would vanish.

An indicator light blinked green and the door slid into the hull.

Laurel moved without hesitation, dropping into the gravity of the KSC vessel and pushing forward to the inner door. In her peripheral vision, she saw Bishop and Federov spread out to either side, the scale of the KSC lock affording them more room to maneuver. Bishop hit the bulkhead next to her and Federov slotted into place on the other side of the hatch. She hit the keys to close the outer airlock and cycle the inner. They were likely under electronic observation, and she didn’t want to give any of the crew the chance to examine their “uniforms” too closely. The outer door slid shut and the inner door began to cycle. It opened and Laurel stepped into the corridor beyond, Bishop and Federov on her heels.

The airlock was located amidships, a standard setup for a passenger or crew lock. Aftward, the corridor was empty. From the other direction, presumably on their way from the bridge, she saw a trio walking briskly toward her.

The one in front wore the kind of exaggerated uniform preferred by the various corporate services. It was full of gold braid and burnished brass affixed to a deep blue ship suit and included an honest-to-God hat, an outrageous boxy thing that sat square upon the woman’s head. Based on this elaborate affair, Laurel pegged her as the captain. The people with her must have been her junior officers judging by the fact that their uniforms boasted a similar, albeit somewhat more understated, showiness. The captain had been walking toward them with a professional smile on her lean face, but as she took in their unorthodox attire, that smile faltered.

Shit.

Competent people were great when they were on your side. But damned if she didn’t hate it when the other side had professionals. As the captain’s eyes widened and her pace slowed causing her two subordinates to stumble into her, Laurel reacted. Her pistol appeared in her hand as if by its own accord and she leveled it at the approaching officers, who had stumbled to a halt maybe four meters from them.

“Keep quiet and keep your hands where we can see them,” she barked, infusing her voice with every ounce of authority and command that she could bring to bear.

One of the junior officers, his corporate-designated rank indecipherable to anyone outside of the corporations’ halls, stared at her with a dumbfounded expression on his face. The captain, every bit the professional, did the smart thing. She obeyed the commands of the woman pointing a gun at her head. The other officer, though, had either a hero complex or a death wish. Instead of obeying, he lunged forward, arms outstretched, as if to attempt to tear the firearm from Laurel’s grip by main strength.

Only to be met by the butt of Federov’s boarding shotgun square into his forehead.

The man went down in a heap and, without a word, Federov leveled his weapon at the pair still upright. A quick glance showed Laurel that Bishop was facing away from them, keeping his eyes and weapon pointed aft, covering their six. She gave Federov a slight nod of thanks. With his face shield polarized, she couldn’t see any reply, but from their time aboard the Arcus she could picture the lazy wink he threw in her direction.

“Enough of that, Captain,” Laurel said, taking some of the steel out of her tone. “There is no need for anyone to get hurt.” She glanced down at the unconscious crewman. “Anyone else,” she amended.

“What do you want?” the captain demanded. “Who are you?”

“Who we are doesn’t matter. What matters is that we have no desire to harm you or your crew. And while it’s true that we’ll be liberating some of your cargo, we have no intention of taking all of it. What we do take is insured by SolComm. So, provided you do as you’re told, you’ll all come out of this alive and well and, once you get all the paperwork filed, without any financial harm. Okay?”

The other woman regarded her, face settling into an expressionless mask. Laurel recognized it; she’d worn it herself a time or two. It was the expression of someone struggling to turn off their emotions and just do the damn job. It was a feeling she could relate to, on many levels.

“Very well. What do you want?”

Laurel nodded to the comm attached to the captain’s waist. “Make an announcement to your crew. Tell them the customs agents are going to do a full sweep of the ship, and they’re to go to their quarters. You expect it to take about an hour. They’ll be locked in to minimize the potential for interference or misunderstanding. Make it sound routine. Our computer tech will take temporary control over your systems, so that we know everyone is staying where they’re supposed to.”

“Is that all?” the captain asked. The still-conscious crewman had lost his dumbfounded expression and traded it in for one that hovered somewhere between fear and disbelief. Victims, Laurel noted, often looked that way, but she wasn’t used to being the one to cause that expression. She had to remind herself of her mission.

“That’s all. Once you and your crew are contained, we’ll be in and out of your ship as fast as we can. You have my word that none of your people nor your ship will come to any harm.”

“Your word. Of course.”

The flatness tone stung Laurel and she saw Federov’s grip tighten on his boarding shotgun. She held up a hand to forestall any precipitous action.

“You have no reason to trust it,” Laurel acknowledged. “But you also aren’t spoiled for choice. I’d much rather do things the easy way, but we can play it hard if we have to.” She glanced pointedly to the comm at the woman’s side and then the pistol in her own hands.

“Fine,” the captain said. “May I?”

Laurel nodded her assent, conscious of Federov and Bishop both tensing. If the captain complied, then they had a good chance of getting out of this mess without having to kill anyone. But if she didn’t, if she called on her crew to resist, it was going to get messy. Her stomach turned at the thought of leaving bodies behind. Laurel willed the captain to make the smart choice as she pulled the comm from her belt and keyed the transmitter.

“All hands,” the captain said, “report to your quarters. Our… guests from SolComm Customs will be doing a full sweep of all the common spaces. They assure me it’s routine, but best if we’re out of their way. They’ll be locking the doors behind us to ensure everyone’s safety. Their commander tells me it will be a brief inspection, an hour or so at most. So, let’s all look at this as a welcome break in the day.” The captain raised an eyebrow at Laurel.

“Satisfactory, captain. Now let’s give everyone a moment to follow your orders and then get you and your friends here situated as well.”

*   *   *

It took longer than anticipated. It always did. The crew of the KSC vessel responded to their captain’s orders, and once they were safely in their quarters, it was easy enough for Hayer to make sure that they were not only staying there, but that they weren’t going to be talking to anyone, either. That left the work of transferring the cargo from the KSC ship to the Arcus. It was an “all hands on deck” sort of mission, and they were just over an hour and a half in when Laurel found herself loading the last palette with Lynch. The crates of CO2 scrubbers were light enough that two people could maneuver them onto the motorized palette jacks. As they settled the last one in place, Lynch wiped his brow and sighed. He gave her a tired smile and said, “Last one. We get this done, get the Arcus buttoned up, and it should be smooth flying back to the Fringe.”

“Assuming the people we’ve got locked away don’t break free and try to stop us. We are robbing them blind, after all.”

Lynch shrugged. “True enough.”

His ready agreement surprised her, though it shouldn’t. She’d been with the crew long enough now to know that Lynch made neither excuses nor apologies for the criminal acts that the Arcus engaged in.

“But I think Hayer has them locked down tight enough that we’ll be able to get out of here without too many issues. As to the theft, the manifest said these—” he slapped the palette of scrubbers “—were bound for Phobos and Deimos. I’m not going to shed any tears for the people on either of those rocks.”

Laurel shook her head and hit the control to set the motorized cart in motion. Phobos and Deimos, the moons—if such a word could be used for what were little more than big asteroids—of Mars hadn’t been active colonies for all that long. Their irregular shapes and general inhospitableness made them unattractive as settlements. Until, that was, the ultra-rich inhabitants of Mars decided that the domes were getting too crowded, and with the “wrong kind” of people. Building new domes on Mars wasn’t enough for them; it would be too easy for the general riffraff to make the transition and begin encroaching on their newfound spaces.

“Hard to believe they went to all that effort, instead of just building new domes,” Laurel muttered.

“New domes aren’t exclusive enough,” the captain grunted as he guided the palette jack. “Transport to Mars proper is easy. Storage is even easier; plenty of room. Phobos and Deimos are more like stations—bad ones. Everything has to be imported. Everything’s expensive. A day’s ration of water probably costs ten times what it does anywhere else.”

“Wasteful,” Laurel said. It was more than that. “Shameful” might have been a better word. She might not have thought so even a few months ago. But she’d seen how some of the people lived in the Fringe.

“It is that. And it’s why I’m not shedding too many tears by lifting these scrubbers.”

“Whatever,” she said, remembering that she was supposed to be a hardened criminal. “As long as we get paid.”

“As long as we get paid,” Lynch agreed.

RAJANI

Rajani Hayer grimaced as she pulled her ship suit on. She hated wearing the thing, no matter how much she could respect the thinking behind it. It was tight, restrictive, and generally uncomfortable. But they were about to transfer the cargo they’d “acquired” from KSC to their buyers, and one scan of the ship had convinced her that the captain’s recommendation to suit up was only common sense.

The vessel was, to be generous, a drifting hulk unfit for human habitation. Except that her scans had showed exactly that—so much habitation, in fact, that it was difficult to get an accurate read on just how many people might be crammed into the wreck. Thousands of souls. Maybe tens of thousands.

When she’d walked away from her former life, she had thought she’d known about life on the Fringe. She’d expected dirt and lawlessness. She’d steeled herself for low-calorie rations. And she’d thought she understood poverty. To her, poverty had been some sort of noble ideal; it conjured images of a downtrodden working class that, fortified by common struggles, forged bonds in shared adversity and soldiered on, keeping a stiff upper lip and an unbreakable spirit. Poverty had been synonymous with fortitude and endurance. It had been quietly admired by her and her academic peers at university functions; functions, she now knew, that had burned through more calories and oxygen in a single hour than some Fringe families saw in a week.

Her eyes had been rather forcibly opened in those first few weeks.

She’d had no idea where she was going when she left the university. All official channels were closed to her: institutes of higher learning, large corporations, Commonwealth jobs, and anyone and anything that might file little things like employment paperwork or tax returns or make electronic note of her presence. All those systems were subject to unquestioned and unlimited review by the SolComm Internal Security Bureau. Popping up in those databases would make it all too easy to find her when the other shoe finally dropped. That hadn’t left many options. She could have found a remote station and tried to make a name for herself on the darknet doing corporate espionage or creating false identities. But that would draw exactly the kind of attention she didn’t want.

The captain had found her on Heritage station. By that point, she had been exhausted: what few hard credits she’d possessed had been spent getting as far away from the core of SolComm as possible and she could no longer use any method of payment that could be tracked. She had put out a few tentative feelers around the station, looking to put her coding skills to work—no questions asked—to earn some cash. Of course, she had also been terrified that the SCISB would be on her the second she did.

Luckily, Captain Lynch had appeared first. He’d had work and she’d needed it. It hadn’t, strictly speaking, been legal work, but she figured that ship had left port when Manu escaped. A tightness gripped her chest at the thought of Manu; she did her best to crush it, telling herself for the ten thousandth time that Manu hadn’t been a person. She had taken the job and she had done it. And done it well. She hadn’t been expecting the captain’s next offer, to join the crew of the Arcus. But at the time, it had seemed heaven sent. A ship, she’d thought, would be just the thing. She would be a lot harder to find—by Manu or SolComm—if she was always on the move somewhere in the vastness of space. The captain had explained how the Arcus worked: equal shares; no questions.

It seemed like the perfect fit. That had been two years ago, and things had been going well enough. Better than she had any right to expect, given the circumstances.

But she still hated cramming herself into the ship suit.

*   *   *

R292-A was even worse on the inside than the scans had indicated.

The crew had gathered in the cargo bay, packed between the crates of CO2 scrubbers. Rajani noted that the captain, Federov, and the new girl all wore guns on their hips. Bishop, at least, seemed more reasonable and had no visible weapon. Rajani barely knew which end of a firearm was the dangerous one, despite Captain Lynch insisting that she learned the basics. She certainly wouldn’t be touching one any time soon.

“Listen up, people,” the captain said, gathering their attention. His words had taken on the deeper tone and clipped cadence that she thought of as his “captain’s voice.” “The air inside this tin can is going to be bad. Bad enough that if we don’t keep the rest of the Arcus buttoned up, we might need new scrubbers of our own. It’s right on the edge of dangerous; past it, really, if you’re here for more than a few hours. But these people are proud and stubborn.”

“Aren’t we all,” Federov muttered. “Wouldn’t be out here, otherwise.”

“True enough,” Lynch acknowledged as the others chuckled. Rajani didn’t. “The point is, the polite thing to do is keep our hoods off. It’s going to be unpleasant, but it won’t kill us. We’re only here for an hour; these poor bastards live like this. Understood?”

That garnered nods all round and the captain hit the control to open the cargo bay doors. Rajani steeled herself for the worst, but she wasn’t close to prepared. There was a faint hiss of shifting pressure as the Arcus’s cargo bay and R292-A reached equilibrium. Then the stench—and that was the only possible word—hit her with a near-physical force. It was a horrendous brew of smells; the inevitable odor of humanity living in close proximity and with limited water that pervaded every colony, ship, and station was to be expected. The acrid tangs of lubricants and metals underscored with the tang of rust was unsurprising. Either would have been unpleasant, but when combined with the raw sewage and putrescent mold smell of a failing environmental system, it was all Rajani could do not to gag. Almost as bad as the stench was thinness of the air. Small shallow breaths left her feeling lightheaded, and she had to choose between not getting enough oxygen or drawing full lungsful of the atrocious concoction. It took a conscious effort of will to not immediately deploy the hood of her ship suit.

Morales started coughing and sputtering and Bishop began swallowing rapidly against the rising bile. Lynch hid his reaction well, but Rajani could just make out the tightening around his lips and the clenching of his jaw muscles.

Federov, however, drew a deep and exaggerated breath. “Smells like home,” he said with a grin.

“Let’s go,” Lynch said. He put action to the words, first hitting the controls of the loader sled they’d acquired from the KSC ship. Rajani forced herself to take a few more breaths, trying, and failing, to acclimate herself. Then she gave up and followed the others.

As soon as they were off the Arcus with a single palette of scrubbers in tow, Lynch sent the signal back to the ship. The cargo ramp lifted behind them and she heard the faint sounds of the vessel locking down. She hated this part of any job, the part where they all waited to see if their employer would betray them. Locking the ship wouldn’t do any good if the nomads aboard R292-A decided it would be easier to shoot them than pay them. If word spread, no one else would risk dealing with them and R292-A would be finished as a station. But that would be little consolation to the crew of the Arcus.

A dozen people waited a respectful distance from the ramp. Most of them were armed, some with boarding shotguns, others with simple truncheons. Every hip held a pistol or combat knife. The dangers of the Fringe went both ways.

One of them pushed their way to the front. Like everyone she saw before her—and most people she’d seen since walking away from her old life—they were thin, almost to the point of emaciation. They wore a ship suit, its model not dissimilar from the one Rajani wore, save for the mismatched patches. Tears happened; Rajani had torn her own suit twice already, but those had repaired themselves, using the nanite technology that was standard. How old and hard-used did a suit have to be before you needed to use actual patches?

“Captain,” the person rasped, offering a gloved hand. Lynch took it without comment. “Welcome aboard.” The speaker’s eyes darted from the single palette of scrubbers to the ship’s hold and back again. “This can’t be it, can it?”

“We’ve got more,” Lynch said. He reached into one of the containers and pulled out the CO2 scrubber. It was a simple rectangle, banded in composites wrapped around a filter created using solid-state amines. When activated, they worked by binding excess carbon dioxide in an atmosphere. They were inexpensive, easy enough to manufacture, and even with Old Earth’s resources closed to SolComm, there was more than enough raw materials available from asteroids, moons, and the gas giants to ensure an effectively unlimited supply.