Belt Three Read online

  After the tour they rode the transit module back to the first ring. Keldra fell silent, but she looked at him as if expecting him to say something.

  Jonas decided to fill the silence. ‘So, where are we going?’

  ‘Columbia. The civil war there means lots of unprotected refugee ships. We need to start building another nuke.’

  ‘How noble.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  He licked his lips, thinking back to Olzan’s memory. Keldra was emotionally vulnerable, open to manipulation, he was sure; he just had to find the right key. It was worth a try.

  ‘You know, when you told me about your crusade against the Worldbreakers, I thought you were an idealist. I thought you believed in a perfect world.’ He pronounced the last two words deliberately, hoping that they’d strike a nerve.

  Keldra’s face went pale. She broke eye contact and turned away.

  ‘You’re right that we ought to fight the Worldbreakers,’ he went on. ‘We’ve given up, collectively, as a species. We all just climb over one another to get to the top of the heap, while the Worldbreakers make the heap smaller and smaller. There ought to be more people living in a perfect world.’

  The words made her flinch. Jonas suppressed the urge to smile as he moved in for the kill.

  ‘What you’re doing isn’t fighting back, and you know it. You’re nothing but a common pirate with an obsession. You should find an effective way to strike against the Worldbreakers, and if you can’t do that you should find a way to live without killing people.’

  The transit module had come to rest in the first ring.

  ‘Tour’s over,’ Keldra spat as she unclipped herself. ‘You know where your cabin is.’ She pushed Jonas out of the module and then closed its doors and departed for the second ring.

  A few moments later, as he closed the door of his cabin, he felt the gentle drifting sensation of the ship rotating to reposition its sail. Keldra had changed course.

  Chapter Five

  Jonas sat at the desk in his cabin and pushed the lid of the useless terminal down until it was flush with the desktop. He flexed his fingers like a pianist about to play. His hands were steady, but he could feel the nervousness in his chest. It was just possible that what he was about to do would trigger Keldra’s implant and kill him.

  ‘Open virtual office,’ he said.

  Nothing happened.

  It had been too much to hope that Olzan had left his implant on the default settings. Most administrators with implants set the commands to something more personal. There was no point in making them obscure – no one could use the implant but the person in whose brain it was implanted – but if Olzan had set the command to something idiosyncratic then Jonas might never be able to guess it.

  ‘Access admin functions,’ he said. That had been his command when he had been Gabriel’s administrator back on Oberon. Still nothing. ‘Virtual office, open. Open office. Open desktop. Admin functions. Admin office.’

  It took Jonas a few minutes to get through all the command combinations he could think of. If Keldra had a bug in his quarters then she’d know what he was trying to do, but he didn’t think she did: implanting him had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, and since then he’d been either in his quarters or with her the whole time, so there was no time in which she could have planted anything.

  No luck with any phrase that he tried. If the trigger was an obscure voice command then he might never find it, but it was possible that it was something non-verbal.

  He clapped his hands together and then pulled them apart, as if conjuring the virtual desktop out of the air. Nothing. He tried clapping twice in quick succession. Three times. Four, five, six. Any more than that and it felt too unwieldy to be convenient. He didn’t think Olzan would have wanted to start applauding the air whenever he wanted to work.

  Perhaps clicking his fingers would be more Olzan’s style. He tried once. Twice. Three times—

  Icons exploded into the air in front of him, whirling around for a moment as they tried to anchor themselves in space, before settling onto the surface of the desk like ghostly ornaments. In the centre of the desk was a rectangular pad with the implant’s general status report.

  2510-AUG-14

  Last login: 2503-FEB-03

  Warning: Possible implant damage. Diagnostic needed.

  0 unread messages.

  Jonas waved his hand through the icon representing the implant’s saved memories. A list of memories scrolled onto the middle of the desk, each identified by a time/location stamp. There were a few dozen, covering the years from 2498 to 2503.

  Jonas scanned down the list and found Olzan’s memory of giving Keldra the tour. It was dated 2502-NOV-01. There were half a dozen memories after that point, the last one recorded on the same date as Olzan’s last login to the virtual office. If there was something he could use against Keldra, it would most likely be in one of those later memories, recorded while she had been on board.

  The next memory after Keldra’s tour had a timestamp of 2502-DEC-14. Jonas attempted to play it.

  Implant malfunction. Playback unavailable.

  Of course. That would have been too easy. He guessed the implant malfunction was deliberate hacking on Keldra’s part. Implants were Earth-tech, their workings only partially understood. It might be that disabling the memory playback was easier than deleting the stored memories themselves.

  He tried a few other memories. All the memories after Keldra’s tour were similarly locked.

  He tried the memory of Keldra’s tour. He knew the implant could play that one…

  Implant malfunction. Playback unavailable.

  Jonas smiled. It seemed that Keldra’s hacking was imperfect. If the right trigger phrase had got around the block for that memory, then it was possible that different triggers – phrases, images, or sensations – would allow him to play back other memories.

  He had to hope there was something in one of those memories that would help him to manipulate Keldra. The implant meant that he couldn’t overpower her, or slip away into a city; but if he played her right, she would deactivate the implant and let him go.

  Finding the triggers for the other recordings would take time, if it was possible at all, but he had the entire journey to Columbia – or wherever the Remembrance was headed now – in order to try.

  The woman stood close, her face filling the recording servitor’s view. She pushed a strand of long black hair from her face and smiled, nervously, as if not quite comfortable with recording a message through an expressionless servitor.

  Jonas looked out through the servitor’s eyes. He felt a ghostly sense of dissociation from inhabiting the servitor’s body, but he retained his sense of identity: the servitor had no identity of its own to override his. This was a memory that Olzan had received as a message, rather than one he had recorded himself.

  He had been thinking of Gabriel, he realized. That was what must have triggered the memory. He and Gabriel had used servitors to record messages for one another when they had been apart. As well as being able to record all five senses, a servitor recording had the advantage that it didn’t leave a trace on the city datanet: no one could read it without physical access to the servitor on whose implant it was recorded; the perfect means to carry on a clandestine love affair.

  Jonas had treasured the messages Gabriel had sent him over the few years they had known one another. Awkward and endearing, gradually becoming more intimate as their professional relationship changed into friendship and then something more. He had intended to keep them after he’d had his admin implant removed in order to pass as a true-born, but the black market surgeon he’d used had damaged it beyond repair. Now all he had were his natural memories of Gabriel, and those were too painful for him to think of often.

  ‘Olzan, I’ve got news,’ the woman said. She had a mellifluous Belt Three true-born accent, the type of voice that Jonas had spent the last six years affecting. ‘I talked to father again, about us. He’s not
angry any more. He says he would have liked me to marry a true-born, but he wants me to be happy as well. He’s…’ She looked away for a moment. ‘He’s not a bad person, Olzan. He just wants what’s best for the family. Next time you’re here, you should talk to him some more.’ The woman paused, as if waiting for Olzan to reply, but of course, the servitor said nothing. ‘Listen, he says a new job has come up,’ she continued. ‘Something a bit different from what you normally do, something important. I don’t know what it is. He’ll send the details. But he said that, if you do it, he’ll pay for the treatment, so we can get married.’ She moved closer, put a hand on the servitor’s shoulder. Jonas found its lack of response unnerving. ‘You’ll be part of the family, Olzan. We can have children, and they’ll be true-borns. Just one more job and we can be together.’

  She leaned in and kissed the servitor, a long, slow kiss, and the message ended, leaving Jonas alone in his dark cabin.

  The next day, Jonas found Keldra in her control nest on the bridge. The room was dark, and projected onto the bridge screen was a full-system chart: five concentric rings showing the five inhabited belts. A tangle of curving red lines marked the estimated courses of the hundreds of Worldbreakers currently starward of the veil, as they swept through the belts on great destructive arcs. In the centre was a solid ring of red, the hazy image of the thousands more Worldbreakers within the veil performing their mysterious industries in close orbit around the sun.

  Yellow blobs picked out the two hundred or so remaining human cities. There were no name labels, and on a map this scale Jonas couldn’t tell which city was which. One city down in Belt Two was close to the red line of a Worldbreaker, and was picked out with a warning symbol. If that Worldbreaker changed course towards the city, it would have to be evacuated.

  There was one other symbol that Jonas didn’t recognize, a blue star, in the void between Belts Two and Three.

  As soon as Keldra noticed Jonas she made a hand movement and the blue star vanished. She was holding a foil tray of instant breakfast, something like powdered eggs, and a stained coffee cup perched on the edge of her control nest.

  ‘So, where are we going, Captain?’ he asked.

  She swallowed her mouthful. ‘Columbia. I told you.’

  ‘You’re not much of a liar, Keldra. I felt us change course.’

  She looked for a moment as if she were about to deny it, but then seemed to change her mind. She made a hand movement and a line appeared on the screen, showing the Remembrance’s new course. ‘We’re stopping off at Santesteban first. I want to sell the stuff I got from your ship. Pick up some supplies.’ She gave him a patronizing smile. ‘I don’t suppose it’s your kind of place.’

  Santesteban was one of the independent cities that thrived off of piracy. It allowed armed civilian ships to dock, and it didn’t have law-enforcement treaties with other cities, so pirates could use it as a safe haven as long as they didn’t interfere with the city’s own interests.

  Jonas studied the chart. Now that he knew which dot was Santesteban, he thought he could identify Columbia from his memory of belt orbits. Going to Santesteban first would be a significant detour, too large just for the sake of offloading loot and buying supplies. Keldra’s story was clearly a lie, but for now he decided not to push her for an answer. ‘So what do I do here?’ he asked. ‘I’m Administrator-caste, but there’s no one for me to administer. I can’t help much with the engineering.’

  ‘You get communications,’ Keldra said. ‘You’re a lying, manipulative bastard. From now on you get to lie and manipulate for me. That’s when we get to Santesteban, though. In the meantime there’s some grunt work you can get on with.’ She pointed across the room, and a terminal to one side lit up and purred. It hadn’t been there yesterday; it looked like Keldra had installed it for him.

  He sat down and examined the terminal. It was set up as a communications console, but actual access to the communications laser was locked out for the moment. If he waited until she ordered him to transmit something he might be able to get out a coded message at the same time, although he wasn’t sure to whom. Perhaps the Solar Authority would help him if he could keep up his Gabriel Reinhardt act.

  He flipped through the terminal’s other settings. Cargo space allocation, servitor duty rosters, damage monitoring. Dozens of tasks that needed a human eye from time to time, but not a very talented one. There was no access to anything critical, of course, and even if he did find some way to use cargo space allocation against Keldra, she would know about it instantly.

  ‘I’ll give you access to the comms laser when you need it,’ Keldra said. ‘For now, there’s a list of tasks in the console. Get to work.’

  Keldra kept the ship on a twenty-four-hour cycle, with the corridor lights dimming for twelve hours each day. Another sign of the pirate’s obsession with Earth, Jonas assumed. Despite the cycle, Keldra herself kept an irregular schedule. He sometimes heard her moving about in the corridor in the middle of the night, and there was no pattern to the times he would find the foil tray from an instant meal lying on the dining room table. He preferred to keep a regular sleep pattern, and after a couple of days he had synced himself with the ship’s day-night cycle, but he never knew when she would buzz the intercom and summon him to help with some repair or maintenance task.

  Keldra had put in place an impressive network of automated routines to make her small army of servitors work with the mechanical systems to keep the ship in good repair and respond to minor incidents. Watching the servitors in action, the Remembrance seemed more like an organism than a machine, with the servitors as individual cells and Keldra in her nest as the brain. Even so, no amount of automation could completely make up for the lack of a free-willed crew. Keldra spent most of her time just maintaining the ship, coping with the daily minor emergencies caused by its age and its many modifications. The workshop that had been Tarraso’s was now cluttered with untidy heaps of machinery, waiting for Keldra to either repair them or strip them down for parts. Jonas’s mechanical skills were modest, but she put him to work anyway; there were many jobs that benefited from a second free-willed pair of hands.

  When she didn’t need him for some ship maintenance task, Keldra barely spoke to Jonas. Sometimes she would walk into the dining room while he was eating and look at him in confusion, as if she had forgotten he was on the ship, before giving him a disapproving glare and walking off. At other times she would stride haughtily by, not making eye contact, as if she thought she could hurt his feelings by ignoring him. But she trusted him – or rather, trusted the threat of her implant – enough that she no longer carried the nerve gun.

  Jonas spent his free time roaming the ship, looking for ghosts.

  Olzan sat at the head of the dining room table as the rest of the crew filtered in and took their seats. Tarraso and Keldra were both speckled with machine oil from whatever task he had called them away from; Tarraso arrived a few moments after Keldra, since he insisted on thoroughly washing his hands no matter how urgent the summons. Brenn was there immediately in person, although perhaps not mentally. Vazoya arrived last and didn’t sit down, instead hovering in the kitchen doorway with a cup of her bitter black coffee in her hand.

  ‘I’ve just got new orders from Mr Glass,’ Olzan said, once everyone was seated. He tried to say it casually, to head off any hostility from the crew. This wasn’t something that would be easy to break to them. ‘We’re to abandon the Alexandria run and make for Konrad’s Hope.’

  Vazoya made a sour face. ‘What about our cargo?’

  ‘We dump the cargo to reduce our mass. We’re to get to Konrad’s Hope quickly.’

  ‘That’s bullshit. Wendell Glass doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. We should go to Alex first. Whatever’s in Konrad’s Hope can wait.’

  ‘No it can’t,’ Olzan said. He cleared his throat, not sure of the best way to break the real reason to them. He’d been nervous too when he’d heard it. ‘There’s something else. Konrad’s Hop
e—’

  ‘There’s a Worldbreaker,’ Keldra said.

  Everyone stared at her. She had barely spoken since Olzan had press-ganged her onto the ship. She was sitting at the end of the table, leaning back in her chair, placing her a little way away from the rest of the group. She had her arms folded and her expression was hard to read; she seemed angry, but not at anyone in the room.

  ‘There’s a Worldbreaker,’ Olzan said, breaking the silence. ‘It changed course twenty-eight hours ago, so Konrad’s Hope is in the danger zone.’

  Tarraso was staring at Keldra. ‘How the hell do you know that? We didn’t know we were going to Konrad’s Hope until just now.’

  ‘Keldra monitors the Worldbreakers,’ Brenn said helpfully. ‘She likes to know where they all are.’ He was the only one who didn’t seem affected by the news. If something wasn’t happening to the ship right now, Olzan thought, it wasn’t quite real to him.

  ‘Who the hell does that?’ Tarraso said. ‘That’s…morbid.’

  Keldra shrugged.

  Vazoya took a sip of her coffee and smiled thoughtfully at Olzan over the top of the cup. ‘So we’re part of an evac run? I didn’t think Wendell wanted us to do those.’

  ‘This is an exception.’

  ‘Are we going in for anyone specific, or seeing who’ll pay?’

  ‘Neither.’ This was the other part of the news that the crew might take badly, especially Vazoya. ‘We’re not picking up passengers. Mr Glass has some items he wants us to acquire.’