Belt Three Read online

  Belt Three

  JOHN AYLIFF

  HarperVoyager

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street,

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015

  Copyright © John Ayliff 2015

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015. Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

  John Ayliff asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.

  Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-811357-5

  Version: 2015-05-15

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  The ship was a spindly two-ring clipper, tacking against orbit as it dropped sunward through the main shipping lanes of Belt Three. Jonas magnified the image to fill the bridge screen, so that the insect-like body of the clipper stood out against the golden plane of its sail. The ship was battered, asymmetrical, its grav-rings and spine lost beneath a crust of repairs. There was a marking on the side of its cargo bay, a feathered spiral of white on blue, presumably the logo of some minor shipping company. Apart from its heading, it looked like any of the other ageing tramp freighters that plied the orbits of the inhabited belts.

  ‘Ayla, is that course reading correct?’ Jonas asked.

  The pilot jumped in her seat. ‘What was that, sir?’

  Ayla often became so lost in her connection with the ship that she stopped paying attention to her physical surroundings, but she normally hid it better than that. Jonas made a mental note to give her some time off when they reached port. The stress of the evacuation was getting to all of them.

  ‘That ship,’ Jonas said, indicating the screen. ‘It looks like it’s heading for our rock. Can you get its transponder data?’

  Ayla’s eyes defocused for a moment as she checked the Coriolis Dancer’s sensors. ‘Yes, sir, the course reading is correct. It’s the Remembrance of Clouds, a private trader registered out of New Calais.’

  Jonas frowned. ‘Clouds? Odd name for a ship.’

  Ayla consulted her implant again. ‘That’s not its original name. The transponder has been hacked. With more time I could tell what the original name was.’

  ‘No, don’t worry about it,’ Jonas said. A hacked transponder was a warning sign, but if the ship really was heading into a Worldbreaker Red Zone, time was the last thing it had.

  He looked back to the local belt chart. His abandoned uranium mining outpost, LN-411, was a day’s orbit behind the Dancer, deep inside the conical Red Zone that marked the probable course of the Worldbreaker. Warning glyphs flagged that the rock was forty-five hours from Black Line. The trajectories of dozens of ships traced curved lines across the screen, abandoning rocks in the Red Zone and fleeing towards distant cities.

  There were the usual couple of Scriber Immolation ships heading back into the Red Zone, cheap eggshells filled with suicidal cultists on their final pilgrimage. Jonas stabbed a control to filter them out of the image. With the Scribers gone, the only ship moving into the Red Zone was the Remembrance of Clouds.

  Something was wrong here, and if it might affect the Dancer’s safety then Jonas wanted to know what it was sooner rather than later.

  ‘Hail the Remembrance of Clouds.’ Ayla spoke quietly into the air, letting her implant pick up the words. ‘Remembrance of Clouds, this is the Reinhardt Industries mining hauler Coriolis Dancer. Please acknowledge.’

  A woman’s face appeared on the screen immediately, as if she had been waiting for the hail. She looked perhaps thirty, square-jawed, with a mass of unkempt blonde hair and a web of pale scars across one side of her face like an impact crack on glass. Jonas could make out a blue-and-white circular symbol behind her, the same one that he had seen on the side of her ship. She looked at him with an unfriendly smirk, not speaking.

  He ignored the woman’s expression and put on a business-like smile. ‘This is Captain Gabriel Reinhardt on the Reinhardt Industries mining hauler Coriolis Dancer.’

  ‘Captain Keldra ’82-Pandora, Remembrance of Clouds.’ Her voice had the coarse accent of a Belt Three tank-born.

  ‘Captain Keldra, it looks like you’re heading for the LN-411 asteroid. Are you aware that rock is in a Worldbreaker Red Zone? All the mining stations have been evacuated, so if you’re going there to trade…’ Jonas left the sentence hanging. The woman’s smile was unnerving, and she had shown no surprise at the mention of the Worldbreaker.

  ‘I’m not heading for LN-411 right now,’ Keldra said. The transmission shut off.

  Ayla swivelled in her seat to face Jonas, looking on the verge of panic. ‘Captain, the ship’s altering course. They’re not heading for LN-411. It looks like…’

  ‘They’re heading for us,’ said Jonas.

  ‘Yes.’

  He cursed under his breath. ‘Pirates.’

  Ayla’s eyes widened. ‘Pirates?’

  ‘Full burn. Evasive manoeuvres.’

  Ayla closed her eyes for a moment, and Jonas felt the deep rumble and the shift in gravity as the hauler’s ponderous engines fired.

  ‘I can try, but we’re overloaded, and there’s nowhere to run to, even if we went deeper into the Red Zone,’ she said.

  ‘No, stay out of the Red Zone.’

  Ayla nodded, relieved. She was no Scriber. Even with pirates bearing down, no normal person would willingly head into the path of a Worldbreaker.

  Jonas swung out of his chair and headed for the door. ‘You have the bridge. I’ll be back soon.’

  From the outside, the Coriolis Dancer resembled a fat metal mushroom. A single grav-ring ran around the outside of a domed cargo bay, with the fuel tank and chemical reaction drive protruding below the bay like a stalk. Jonas kept the grav-ring spun up at a quarter gee to match the home gravity of most of the miners. Normally on a homeward run the cargo bay would be packed with canisters of uranium to sell at the nearest city, but today it was crammed with the mining
and hab equipment they’d salvaged from their hurried evacuation of LN-411, with their last haul of uranium nestling forlornly in the centre.

  Jonas’s two dozen mining servitors stood in a row along the ring’s orbital corridor. He tried not to meet their blank stares as he ran past. As Gabriel had, Jonas made sure only to use legal servitors – condemned criminals, or tank-borns who had been unable to pay off their cloning debt – but he knew there was a thriving black market in the mind-wiped victims of pirate raids. That would be how Ayla and the rest of his crew would end up if the Remembrance caught them, and Jonas as well, if Keldra learned his secret.

  Most of the free-willed personnel were crammed into the crew lounge, almost the only room on the ship not filled with hastily rescued mining equipment. There were six Worker-caste mining supervisors, and a couple of Engineer-caste members of the Dancer’s regular crew. They looked up from game pads as Jonas opened the door. He found Matton, the huge red-bearded mining foreman, and gestured for him to come out into the corridor.

  Matton waited until they were in the corridor and the door was shut before he spoke. ‘We felt the engines fire.’

  ‘Ayla’s putting us on an evasive course,’ Jonas said. ‘Pirates.’

  Matton had worked for years to build up his physical strength, but he still moved with the grace of someone who’d been raised in quarter gravity. Now he closed his eyes for a moment and took a breath, and Jonas could tell he was suppressing an urge to punch something.

  ‘Damn scavengers, picking us off at a time like this. Well, we had a good run while it lasted. Do you know what to do?’

  ‘I want you to jettison the cargo. Empty the bay.’

  Matton sighed. ‘You know that’s not what I meant.’

  ‘It might make us light enough to outrun them.’

  ‘Wouldn’t work. What kind of ship is it?’

  ‘It’s a two-ring clipper. Salamander class, I think.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t work. The Salamander has some of the best engines outside of a Solar Authority cruiser. If they’re looking to rob us they’ll be flying with an empty cargo bay. We don’t have the acceleration to evade them.’

  ‘It’s still worth a try. What if we strip out everything non-essential? Empty the grav-ring. We just need engines and life support.’

  ‘That would take hours. The pirates would be on us before we were done.’

  Jonas frantically tried to think. ‘We’ve got a servitor combat programme, haven’t we?’

  ‘A basic one, yes, but we’ve no weapons. The servitors couldn’t repel a pirate boarding party.’

  ‘No, of course not, but they could be a diversion. If we tie the pirates up in a fight, the rest of us can escape in the shuttle, and if we jettison some junk at the same time then they might not notice us.’

  Matton shook his head. ‘They would notice us, and we’d be lucky if they stopped to pick us up rather than shooting us out of space. Sir, you’ve got to surrender. Pirates don’t hurt true-borns. They’ll ransom you to your family – that’s how it works. You can’t save us, but you can save yourself.’

  ‘I’ve got to try something. Give me a programming spike.’

  Matton drew the device from the pocket of his overalls and handed it to Jonas. ‘It’s up to you, sir, but it’s a bad idea. I should get back in there and tell the men what’s happening.’

  ‘Tell them I’ll get them out of this,’ Jonas said. ‘I don’t just want to ransom myself. I’ll find a way to save all of us.’

  ‘Sir, you can’t, so don’t try. I’m not going to go in there and give those people false hope.’

  ‘Matton—’

  ‘Sir, you’re more important than us,’ Matton said gently. ‘We’re just tank-borns. Clones. You’re a true-born. Look for a way to save yourself.’

  ‘You know I don’t think I’m better than you.’

  ‘Don’t let the men hear you say that.’ Matton put his hand on the lounge door, and then paused. ‘It’s been an honour working with you, sir.’

  Jonas nodded sadly. ‘And for me.’

  He went up to the nearest servitor and raised the programming spike to the back of its neck, then lowered it again. Matton was right: a straightforward fight would be no good, even as a diversion. He had to think of something else.

  When Jonas got back to the bridge, the Remembrance of Clouds had furled its sail into a bud and was firing up its reaction drive. Ayla had put the Dancer on course for a cluster of small rocks where they might be able to hide, but the pirate ship was closing too quickly. The pilot looked up from her concentration as he entered.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘How long?’

  ‘Just a couple of minutes.’

  Without the glare of reflected sunlight from the sail, the Dancer’s scope was able to resolve more details on the Remembrance of Clouds. Some of what Jonas had taken to be repair jobs were actually weapons: he could see dozens of small missile turrets sprouting all over the ship, and something larger, like a launch tube made of industrial piping, built into the nose complex.

  His mining outpost on LN-411 had deterred pirates using surface-mounted cannons, but most of the cities with which he traded did not allow armed civilian vessels to approach them, so the Coriolis Dancer itself was unarmed. Normally, the Dancer would only travel to a city when the orbits brought it and LN-411 close enough for it to cross without danger, or when it could join a convoy with an armed escort ship. But a Worldbreaker evacuation meant a breakdown in the normal routine of inter-city commerce. At any time there were hundreds of Worldbreakers starward of the veil. When one of them passed through an inhabited section of one of the belts, the Red Zone of its probable course became thick with unarmed ships making long spins to whatever unthreatened outposts they could reach: rich pickings for any pirate ships nearby. Worldbreakers and pirates both struck rarely enough that true-born ship owners accepted the risk; and since pirates would normally ransom true-borns back to their families, the risk to them was purely financial. It was Jonas and his crew’s bad luck that this pirate had focused on them.

  ‘Hail them again,’ Jonas said.

  Ayla put the call through. ‘They’re not responding.’

  ‘Keep trying.’

  He sat back in his control chair and tried to form an image of Keldra in his mind. She had no reason to keep him waiting. It was possible she was tied up by some unrelated task, but more likely she was deliberately keeping him waiting, he decided. Perhaps she liked the feeling of power.

  ‘Are we sure they’re pirates?’ asked Ayla hopefully. ‘That symbol they’re using…I thought pirates used skulls.’

  ‘They usually do.’ Jonas pulled up a magnified image of the logo on the pirate ship’s cargo bay. The spiral was only the skeleton of a more complex pattern: the blue circle was criss-crossed with white streaks and swirls, looking irregular and feather-edged as if they had been hand-painted. He stared for a few seconds before he realized what it depicted. ‘Clouds. That’s a picture of the Earth.’

  ‘Oh,’ Ayla said. ‘I didn’t know what it looked like. I suppose you’d know.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘I’m getting a response through now.’

  Keldra’s expression was smug and cruel; she knew she had already won. ‘Captain Gabriel Reinhardt. I see your ship’s changed course. I hope your pilot isn’t taking matters into her own hands.’

  Jonas made himself smile. ‘Captain Keldra, as you can see, the Worldbreaker has forced us to travel through dangerous territory with no escort. I’m prepared to offer you a substantial fee in exchange for your protection.’

  ‘I’m not interested in being bought off. I want your cargo and your crew.’

  ‘There must be some deal we can reach. This doesn’t have to end with my crew mind-wiped.’

  Keldra looked at him with disgust. ‘You want to negotiate? Spineless true-born scum, think you can talk your way out of every problem.’

  ‘T
hey’re locking weapons,’ Ayla said.

  ‘We have no basis to negotiate,’ Keldra continued. ‘You have nothing I want that won’t be mine in a few moments anyway.’

  ‘I’ll destroy the ship,’ Jonas said suddenly.

  ‘What?’ Keldra froze, and fixed Jonas in a piercing gaze.

  ‘You heard me.’ He had made the threat without thinking, but now he couldn’t take it back. ‘If you try to dock, I’ll overload the reactor.’

  ‘You won’t,’ Keldra said, but Jonas could tell she wasn’t sure.

  ‘Ayla!’ he shouted. ‘Remove reactor safeties!’

  Shocked, Ayla hesitated, but then she closed her eyes for a few seconds and warning icons appeared all over Jonas’s console.

  Keldra seemed to study him for a moment, not quite hiding her uncertainty, then her mouth curled into a wicked smile. ‘So do it. I’m not turning back.’ The transmission shut off.

  Ayla turned back to Jonas, her eyes wide with panic. ‘Gabriel, don’t do this.’

  The Remembrance of Clouds had matched orbit with the Dancer and was closing in to dock. Jonas’s heart sank; he wasn’t sure he could go through with his threat. ‘I can’t let her turn you and the others into servitors,’ he said.

  ‘Sir, we’re dead anyway,’ Ayla pleaded. ‘Let her ransom you to your family. You’re the important one. You…you knew what Earth looked like.’

  On his console’s lidar display, the Remembrance of Clouds was drawing alongside. Jonas’s finger hovered above the control that would overload the reactor, but he found himself unable to press it. Ayla was right: she and the crew were dead, one way or another. Gabriel wouldn’t have wanted Jonas to die like this. There had to be a way out.

  He couldn’t beat the ship, but perhaps he could beat the person. He knew Keldra was emotional; he was sure that her anger had been genuine and not an act. She seemed to have enjoyed gloating, so he knew she was cruel. Perhaps he could use that.