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Po was guiding his power loader toward the next shipping container when something caught his eye:
Tanner, the new guy, had just sent his last load up to the magtrains that ran through the giant cylinder’s center...
...and was now rushing toward the same container as Po.
That wouldn’t have meant much, except for Tanner’s obvious haste. Po had only known Tanner for a few days, but already he had the impression the guy was no over-achiever. Maybe not a complete slacker, sure, but since he’d started working the Docks a few days ago, he’d done nothing beyond the bare minimum required.
Not that I blame him, Po thought. I do the exact same thing. Po never, ever exerted himself beyond what he needed to do to keep his job. Why break your back for the company that had enslaved you before you were even born?
Either way, Tanner’s behavior seemed highly unusual. The W-200 Powered Loader—the workhorse of the solar system—was slaved to its operator’s movements, with sophisticated subroutines designed to dampen any inefficient or involuntary inputs from the controller, a system that usually resulted in a smooth ride.
But Tanner was fresh out of the five-week training period required to operate one of the mechs, and he still hadn’t learned to let the machine lead his movements…at least, not at the speed he was trying to operate it at right now. The W-200 lurched sideways as he navigated around a stationary crane arm, nearly toppling his machine as he did.
Po grinned, then sped up his own gait. Unlike Tanner’s mech, his surged confidently forward, since he knew to keep his movements steady and conserved.
At first, Po had been fine with letting Tanner reach the container first, to let him process it for transport elsewhere in the asteroid colony. But then, a few things had clicked into place in his head.
It had been almost two months since the last time someone had been caught rerouting shipping containers, to be accessed by smugglers at a new destination. Yes, the “new destination” was always just another Equipoise Metals warehouse, and so usually the change went unnoticed, since the company always recovered the rerouted cargo.
But this time, a supervisor had decided to check the container’s total mass, and found that seventy kilos of…something…had gone missing.
What it had been was anyone’s guess. Probably Joy, Spike, or some other synthetic tweaked to let its user pass drug tests. It didn’t matter, though. The dock worker who rerouted the container had clearly been working with the Obsidian Angels to keep contraband flowing through Psyche Station, and they’d sacked him for it…which was almost as good as a death sentence, on Psyche.
Now, as Po watched Tanner struggle desperately to reach the shipping container first, he felt sure he was looking at the Angels’ newest agent planted among the dock workers. Which meant that container held something valuable. Something that could mean a lot of coin to Po—and to his mother and his brothers and sister.
He was always looking for the angle that would help pay down their colossal debts, and now here it was. A gift from the stars, just waiting for him to pluck it up. He only needed to reroute the container somewhere safe, a place only he would know.
And I won’t be stupid enough to alter its total mass either. I’ll just replace whatever the contraband is with something of the same weight.
Fear jolted through him, and a small voice tried to warn him that messing with the Obsidian Angel meshmind might be a bad idea. Fortune favors the bold, he told the voice, pushing it away.
This was for his sister.
Tanner didn’t have Po’s experience when it came to piloting the W-200, but he was a lot closer, having dropped off his last container at an elevator a lot nearer the ship they were unloading.
Po was gaining on him steadily, but as the distance closed to twenty meters, twelve meters, two meters…Tanner did something unexpected. He threw his mech sideways into Po’s path.
With a gasp, Po yanked back on his handgrips, which threw his body forward against the mech’s roll cage. For an excruciating few seconds, he felt sure he was going to fall forward into Tanner’s mech, possibly wrecking one or both of their machines in the process. But his loader regained its balance just in time, barely avoiding a collision.
“Are you crazy?” Po yelled. Damaging the mechs like that would have been sure to get them both fired, not to mention adding to Po’s already towering generational debt. But all he could hear was Tanner’s laughter, which faded as the other mech pulled away.
The insane maneuver had demonstrated something to Po: Tanner could afford to lose this job. This wasn’t his real job, anyway. He was an Obsidian Angel, and Angels he’d meshed with would take care of him no matter what happened to him here.
But Po would be ruined if he got fired. And Tanner had been willing to exploit that.
Gritting his teeth, Po shoved one handgrip while swinging the opposite foot forward. His mech once again broke into a run, this time much faster than before.
The final stretch to the waiting shipping container was about a hundred meters of relatively open space. Here, Po adopted a new strategy. Knowing he could move much faster than his opponent, he swung around in a wider arc, eliminating Tanner’s ability to force a collision but still gaining ground.
And in the final stretch, Po overtook the other worker’s mech, swinging around the container to slide his grippers into its brackets from the other side.
He locked eyes with Tanner triumphantly, who met his gaze with a menacing leer. Po thumbed the buttons at the tops of his handgrips, which lifted the container from the scuffed metal floor. With that, he strode past Tanner, his motions smooth and easy.
“Hey, Abbato,” Tanner called as Po strutted by him—or at least, as much as it was possible to strut inside a mech carrying a three-ton payload. “Po Abbato, right?”
Something in his voice made Po pause.
“I wonder what your mother would think of you taking the sort of risks you just took with company equipment. She’s on Level 3, Cylinder 22, right? South end? Maybe I should pay her a visit, get her thoughts on it all. I doubt your sister would think much of it, either. Your poor, sick sister.” Tanner’s voice carried a mocking note.
My mother and sister. He’s threatening to tattle on me to my mother and sister. Which meant he wasn’t really threatening to tattle. No, Tanner was an Obsidian Angel, and violence was his bread and butter. This wasn’t a threat on Po’s job, but on his family.
Except, it was worse than that, wasn’t it?
Someone in the meshmind knows who I am. And where I live. Why? Tanner didn’t need to be the one who’d acquired the information. It would be enough that someone else in his meshmind had. If they knew it, Tanner knew it.
Slowly, Po lowered the shipping container to the floor, then retracted his grippers.
“Have it,” he muttered. With that, he stalked away, to await the next container to be unloaded from the docked ship.
***
At the end of his shift, Po dismounted his loader, stored it in its charging alcove, and checked his rads on the way out. The light turned green on the scanner, indicating he was still well within the limits Equipoise Metals considered acceptable for its employees. He gave the rad detector’s mottled plastic case a slap, then headed for one of the hatches leading out of the Docking Cylinder.
The Docks extended outside of the asteroid proper, meaning they didn’t have the usual meters of rock protecting workers from the ever-present threat of radiation. Instead, a layer of compressed hydrogen acted as the Docks’ shields, doubling as a fuel reserve for sale to ship captains looking to top up.
The hydrogen worked just as well, but Po’s mother clung to her superstitions about it.
“You wouldn’t catch me dead working in one of the outer tubes,” she liked to say. She worked as a mineral analyst, in a cylinder nestled deep within Psyche, near one of the entrances to the core mines. “You never know how that’s going to affect you, later on down the line.”
Po would just shake his head when she talked about it, saying nothing. Rosa Abbato was a chronic worrier, and even if he managed to win an argument about hydrogen being just as good as rock for radiation shielding, she’d only start nagging him about something else.
She knows I don’t have a choice, anyway. So why say anything at all? Equipoise needed him at the Docks, so that was where they’d keep him. End of story.
He heaved a sigh as he clicked on his electromagnetic boots by stamping each one twice, then entered the microgravity hub connecting the Docking Cylinder to one of the commercial districts that flanked the Docks on either end. After four years of working in the Docks—first as an apprentice mechanic fixing the loader mechs, and these past two years as an operator—he still hadn’t decided whether he’d rather be at work or at home at any given moment.
He turned the question over in his mind as he traveled down the right side of the wide boulevard, just another working stiff in a flood of Equipoise Metals employees fresh from their shifts. His stride was halting as he waited for each boot to make secure contact with the floor before pulling his rear foot away from the steel surface with a jerk. The last thing he needed was to be seen flailing wildly for one of the overhead handles after breaking contact with both his magnets.
Home had always been unbearable, but it was a different type of unbearable ever since he’d gotten his father arrested for nearly killing his mother. Sometimes he felt like Rosa resented him for doing that, which still seemed crazy to him.
As for Lorenzo, he definitely resented it.
“What did you think you were gonna accomplish, exactly?” His brother’s voice echoed through his thoughts. “You took everything he owed and dumped it right on our heads.”
Which was true, but it had also stopped Luca Abbato from borrowing any more against his children’s future wages.
It’s better, this way. Lorenzo just doesn’t want to see it. Which was no surprise.
At the threshold between the hub and the cylinder that held the dockside market, Po switched off one magnet with a flick of his ankle, then pushed off with that foot, disengaging the other and leaping onto the rotating surface with a practiced motion.
The cylinder had a standardized diameter of 600 meters, meaning it spun at just under two revolutions per minute to simulate one G on its lowest level. There were railed moving platforms you could take that would match you to the cylinder’s rotational speed, but using one of those would make him look like a wuss to the other workers, and besides, he’d long ago mastered the art of making the transition without stumbling.
He hadn’t been inside the commercial district for five seconds when a cop-bot made a beeline for him, its stiff gait straight out of the uncanny valley.
Great. Now I have this thing to deal with.
“Excuse me, sir. I am an Equipoise Metals Security Robot, designation five-alpha-three-seven-hotel-zero, responsible for Cylinders One through Nine. Can you confirm that you are Po Angelo Abbato, son of Luca Abbato and Rosa Abbato?” Its red eyes blinked in time with its words, while its black slit of a mouth remained impassive. The thing’s crowded features and squat, cylindrical head were meant to make it look cute and disarming, but Po had seen these things on the hunt. Most times, they took their targets down before they made it even a quarter of the way down a tube, and they weren’t very gentle about it, either.
“That’s me,” Po answered, studying the bot warily.
“Very well. You have been selected for a pat-down search. Your selection was made using authenticated random selectors, and it is my duty to assure you that it is free of human failings, limitations, prejudice, corruption, negligence, or laziness.”
“What a relief.”
“Do you consent to a pat-down?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“If you decline, it will be noted on your company file.”
Po sighed. “I consent.”
“Very well. I will now proceed with the pat-down. Please hold out both arms parallel to the floor, and spread your legs as wide as you are able to comfortably.”
Po assumed the position, and the robot proceeded to make contact with every inch of him—starting with his tousled brown hair before moving to his face, patting everywhere with its claw-like adjustable silicon hands. He tried to imagine what it might take to successfully conceal contraband inside his exposed skin, but he guessed it would be possible, with the right prosthetic makeup.
He distracted himself by taking in the market beyond, which seemed more gaudy than usual, with multiple rainbow banners stretched across every lane, and holographic posters adorning almost every surface. Nearly every merchant he saw wore a costume, from various historical periods.
Oh, right. Tomorrow’s Landing Day.
Like any self-respecting asteroid mining colony, Psyche had three annual holidays, all kept using Earth’s calendar year: Discovery Day, Probe Day, and Landing Day. They were pretty self-explanatory.
For Psyche, Discovery Day fell on March 17th, and it celebrated the day the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis first discovered the asteroid in the Naples sky in 1852. January 31st was Probe Day, marking the day an unmanned spacecraft first visited the asteroid and confirmed that it was the iron core of a planet, whose outer crust had been stripped off by a collision with…something else.
But August 9th was Landing Day. Seventy-nine years ago today, the first colonists had landed on this rock—Po’s great-grandfather, Alessandro Abbato, being one of them. He was the one who’d first agreed to Equipoise Metals’ family debt scheme, putting the Abbatos in the mess they were still living with three generations later.
Like most stations and colonies, Psyche had no officially recognized holidays other than those three days. The Global Equity Accord—GEA, pronounced gee-uh—discouraged the promotion of any religious or national holidays, claiming it alienated people who didn’t celebrate them. But Po felt pretty sure he knew the real reason behind that particular policy. GEA wanted everyone as divided as possible, with little in common with each other. That lowered the chances of anyone banding together and opposing their rule.
At last, the bot finished. “Thank you for your valued patience and cooperation,” it said, its voice pitched slightly higher than before, which Po had heard was a subtle way of rewarding and reinforcing compliance. “Please expect further delays while traveling the station’s public areas during the next twenty-nine hours and forty-three minutes. Heightened security measures are being implemented to curtail an expected spike in illegal activity during the holiday.”
With that, the bot stalked away without so much as a fare-thee-well. Probably seeking its next victim.
“Nice to see you too,” Po muttered.
But instead of continuing through the press of people thronging the merchants’ stalls, all clamoring to see what goods might be on sale for Landing Day, he lingered, then finally glanced back into the section he’d just left, where the last dock workers were trickling out into the commercial district. A group of five people he didn’t recognize emerged from the microgravity hub, one of them stumbling as he stepped out onto the spinning cylinder.
Freighter crew members, probably, visiting Psyche Station for what seemed like it could be the first time, by the way a couple of them were gawking like tourists. Po scowled at them, distantly aware of the envy that licked at the back of his mind like tongues of flame. He’d never left Psyche in his life, not even once.
The bot had given him an idea. If the station would be crawling with it and its groping amigos until Landing Day was over, then it was unlikely the Obsidian Angels would risk recovering their contraband from the rerouted shipping container until the holiday had ended.
Which meant if Po could find out where it had gone, he could safely get to it before they could. And as long as he could dodge the security bots with his newfound treasure, he could make a lot of crypto selling it—coin that would go a long way toward paying down the debt his father had taken out on him and his siblings.
He’d need help dodging the bots. But finding out where the container had been sent came first.
Luckily, he knew just who to ask.
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