Chapter 1
“Mr. Yamaguchi isn’t taking visitors.”
Nathan Stacker shifted his gaze to the well-dressed man standing on his left. The one who had spoken. He regarded the thug for a moment in silence. He hadn’t come all the way to Dome One to leave without completing the job. This guy had to know that.
“You know who I work for, right?” Nathan said. “Mr. Yamaguchi is late with his payment.”
“Tell them it’s coming,” the guard replied. He started reaching for something behind his back, under his perfectly tailored black jacket.
The movement caused Nathan to start shifting his hand too, deeper into the pocket of his overcoat where his plasma pistol was waiting.
“Careful,” he said.
The guard locked eyes with Nathan. “Relax." He took hold of something and lifted it slowly into Nathan’s view. A small, thin rod of metal. Platinum. A fortune’s worth. “Mr. Yamaguchi authorized me to offer this as a partial payment for debts owed.”
He held it out.
Nathan eyed the platinum. The metal was rare on Proxima, available only in small quantities from the mining expeditions in the nearby asteroid belts. He knew exactly how Yamaguchi had gotten it. Asteroid mining was dangerous work. Way too dangerous for civilians. Criminals, on the other hand? There was no question some of Yamaguchi’s lackeys had wound up in front of the Proxima High Court, convicted and sent to the rigs as punishment for their offenses.
Hell, he had only escaped life as a miner because of a technicality.
The bit of platinum was a treasure to a former Centurion Space Force pilot like him.
It was worthless to his employers.
“I need to speak directly to your boss,” Nathan said, not giving any ground. “Don’t make this hard. I’m not getting paid that well.”
The guard on the right smiled at the comment. The other one wasn’t amused. He pushed the platinum forward again.
“Take this now. Your employer will have the rest in a week.”
“That’s a week late.”
“Plus interest. Mr. Yamaguchi gives his word.”
“Mr. Yamaguchi gave his word that he would pay in full today. Therefore, unless Mr. Yamaguchi pays in full today, Mr. Yamaguchi’s word is as fucking worthless as that platinum.”
The two guards didn’t like that response. Nathan hadn’t expected they would. The one on the left returned the platinum to his back pocket. Of course, when the hand reappeared it wasn’t empty. It was holding a small laser pistol, military grade, silent and deadly. Nobody outside of Centurion Space Force should have had access to that kind of weapon, but then again, the plasma pistol he was carrying was military issue too.
The crooked smile the thug responded with was anything but friendly. “Mr. Yamaguchi will be sure to apologize to the Trust for his late payment. He was expecting a courier to come and pick it up, but unfortunately, the courier never arrived.”
Nathan didn’t wait for the man to finish talking. He took two quick steps forward and lunged at the thug, throwing his overcoat out like a cape to distract the man’s attention. He brought a hard chop down across the guard’s wrist, forceful enough to knock the pistol out of it, getting behind him and locking ankles, driving him back with a hard shove that twisted him over and onto the ground.
Nathan kept moving with the man, preserving the momentum, dropping low while the guard’s head slammed into the floor with enough force to put him out. His other hand had been busy the entire time, getting a grip on the handle of his pistol and aiming through his coat. The other guard had drawn his sidearm, but he wheezed and collapsed as a red bolt burned through Nathan’s coat and caught him in the chest.
Nathan stood up, exhaling his pent-up breath and trying to calm the sudden and rapid rise in his heart rate. Why couldn’t they have just made it easy? The eight hundred he was getting for this would barely be enough to cover his share of the rent.
He considered grabbing the platinum from the unconscious guard. It was easily worth a million or more. He didn’t dare. If word got from Yamaguchi to the Trust that he had stolen anything, they wouldn’t hesitate to make him their next problem.
He glanced at the door. A small red light blinked beside it. He grabbed the unconscious guard under the arms, lifting him and dragging him to the light. He positioned the man’s wrist in front of it, and a moment later the door slid open.
Nathan dropped the guard, stepping over him and past the threshold. He was half-expecting ninjas to come bounding out of the shadows to confront him. He smiled at the thought. This was reality, not a stupid entertainment stream.
Instead, he stood facing the middle of a factory floor. A replicator factory. An older model scheduled for reconditioning. It had produced a lot of the original equipment that had helped build the other equipment that had allowed humankind to settle and survive on Proxima B. After two hundred years, it was about time for the newer replicators it had printed to return the favor.
Even though everything on Proxima was technically owned by everyone, the factory had been operated by the Yamaguchi family for nearly all of those two hundred years. It was essentially theirs, and they didn’t only use it as a standard profit center. The illegal operations were much more lucrative than the government contracts, but scaling meant retrofitting, and retrofitting had a certain cost attached. That was where the Trust came in.
Right now, the factory floor was empty. The workers had all gone home for the night. Large metal boxes rose on either side of Nathan, some up to thirty meters tall. Robotic arms of various sizes rested near them, and thick conduits dove in and out of them, providing power for the sculpting lasers and shapers inside. There were smelters behind the replicators that were kept heated full-time, and he could feel the warmth and smell the molten alloy.
In the corner to his left, finished product waited to be packed and shipped. Parts, mostly. Newer replicators did most of the final work nowadays. A cursory glance revealed pallets of water filtration drive units and other bland crap. A deeper dive would have uncovered other materials like firing pins, bullet casings, and who knew what else.
Nathan didn’t care about any of that. He kept his eyes forward and slightly raised. He could see Yamaguchi’s office on the second floor, a massive wall of glass allowing the owner to look down on his workers and monitor the flow of the goods he was producing.
He could see Yamaguchi inside, looking back.
He kept walking, maintaining a steady pace across the factory floor. There weren’t any ninjas to jump out at him. There weren’t any other guards. Maybe Yamaguchi had thought the Trust would send some other courier to deal with this payment. The two he had dropped weren’t rookies.
They also weren’t like him.
He watched Yamaguchi open the door to his office and begin descending the winding stairs to the floor. The businessman wasn’t rushing. It would look bad for him to appear hurried or afraid.
Nathan noticed someone else appear in the glass of the office. A woman, petite, dark hair and narrow lips. She had predator eyes that landed on him and glared like she wanted to cut his throat. Yamaguchi’s bodyguard. He scanned her for a firearm but didn’t see one. That didn’t mean it wasn’t sitting on a couch or a desk — just out of reach.
He stopped walking when Yamaguchi reached the floor. The man’s shoes clapped on the tiled surface, a smooth cadence that brought him within a few meters. He paused, making eye contact and holding it.
Nathan bowed first. It was proper etiquette. “Mr. Yamaguchi,” he said.
The other man returned the bow. “Mr. Stacker.”
Nathan was surprised the man knew him by name. He opened his mouth to repeat the words the Trust had imparted to him to deliver. “The terms of our—”
“Enough,” Yamaguchi said, putting up his hand to cut Nathan off. “I don’t need to hear it. I know what I agreed to.”
“Then why didn’t you meet with me instead of making me drop your goons?”
“I was otherwise occupied.” His eyes shifted back toward his office. Insinuating what, exactly? “It’s no business of yours, courier.”
He reached into a back pocket, repeating the motion his guard had made a few minutes earlier. He retrieved a second stick of platinum.
“You can get the first from Iko,” he said, holding it out.
“The Trust doesn’t accept payment in—”
“The Trust didn’t specify how they would accept payment in the contract. You can read it yourself if you need proof. This is how I choose to pay.”
Nathan smiled and held out his hand, palm up. Yamaguchi dropped the platinum into it.
“Thank you,” Nathan said, bowing again.
Yamaguchi bowed in return.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Nathan asked. “You could have left both sticks with your man if you didn’t want to be disturbed.”
“I could have,” Yamaguchi replied. “But I had other business with the Trust. They asked me to delay you.”
He looked back at the woman in his office. Nathan looked too, in time to see her short nod.
“It seems both our tasks are completed for the evening, Mr. Stacker,” Yamaguchi said. “Sayonara.”
He turned around and started walking. Nathan stared at his back for a moment, confused.
“Why did they ask you to delay me?” he said.
Yamaguchi didn’t turn around. “Why don’t you ask your wife?”
Chapter 2
Nathan hurried away from the replicator factory, barely noticing the historic sights of Old Praeton. Dome One was the first of the now twenty-three domes that composed the largest city on Proxima B. It was the place where the original settler’s new lives had started after arriving from Earth.
Why don’t you ask your wife?
Yamaguchi’s words echoed in Nathan’s mind as he descended into the loop station. He reached the entry gate and swiped his wrist over the red beam of light spitting out from it, letting it hit the small patch expertly glued over his real identification. The entrance kiosk flashed an image of someone who wasn’t him, told him his credit balance, and opened the gate for him to reach the platform.
Why don’t you ask your wife?
He stood at the edge of the platform, waiting for the vehicle to arrive. He was tense. Nervous. His heart was pounding. He wanted more than anything to stop at a comms terminal and ping Niobe, but if he made contact with anyone before he reported his job as complete, he would be in deep shit.
Why don’t you ask your wife?
The statement made him feel like he was in deep shit already. The Trust didn’t do anything for no reason. Were they angry with him? Had he fucked something up? He didn’t think so. He couldn’t think of anything he might have done wrong.
He heard the soft whooshing of air that signaled the pod’s approach. He turned to look into the tunnel to his left, at the headlight that appeared there.
The pod was long and cylindrical, able to carry two hundred riders at a time. It was shaped like a bullet, its outer shell treated to make it as frictionless as possible, its interior appointed with simple, common synthetics. It glided to an easy stop at the edge of the platform, doors opening at either end to allow embarking passengers to swap places with departing passengers.
Nathan joined the group of people boarding the pod, staying near the doors so he could get off quickly.
Why don’t you ask your wife?
What could Niobe have done to draw the attention of the Trust? She was a scientist and a professor of mathematics. She had been stupid enough to marry him, but otherwise she was a smart woman. Smart enough not to get involved with anything the Trust was involved with. While the syndicate was a myth to most people and claimed as non-existent by anyone working for them, he had passed enough hints in quiet moments she knew what he really did for a living. She didn’t agree with it, but she also knew why he had to do it.
He had been a Centurion Space Force pilot. An officer. A Captain. He was a Stacker, which meant he was top-of-the-line and destined to rise through the ranks of the CSF as he gained experience. During his five years in the military, he’d become a top-scorer in the simulators completed nearly a dozen exploration missions.
Then one day, he and his squadmates were granted some leave. They had gone out for a drink. One of them had too much and started getting rowdy with one of the female patrons, making advances she clearly didn’t want. All he had intended to do was break them up, to get his man to calm the fuck down and chill the hell out. They exchanged words, and then they exchanged fists.
It was only one punch. He had underestimated his strength. He hit his brother-in-arms just right and killed him on the spot. A freak accident. A stupid mistake. There were a number of labels, but the most important one was murder.
He had spent fifty years on the mining rigs, court-martialed and disgraced. They would have never let him go, except he was a Stacker. A first-generation Stacker at that. The decorated veteran from whose DNA he had been designed had a flaw, and that flaw had led all of the first-gen Stackers to develop problems with their mental stability.
They said they couldn’t blame him for that.
He wasn't so sure.
Even so, the Space Force had released him, though they had no intention of helping him restart his life. The social climate for replicas was bad enough, and he had still killed a man.
It had never gotten easier to live with.
Ex-cons on Proxima had two options: Live in a containment center and take whatever few shit jobs you could find, or work for the Trust.
He had gone with the second option. Containment centers were prisons with unlocked doors and no guards. Dangerous, violent, filled with the worst kinds of society. The Proxima Civilian Council claimed they reduced recidivism by eighty percent. The truth was the cons were too busy fucking one another over to mess with the general population.
Why don’t you ask your wife?
The pod took eight minutes to reach Dome Six, where he and Niobe lived. As soon as the doors slid open, he shoved past the other riders and ran to the exit, excusing himself past another group of people to get to the top faster. He ran across the street, barely avoiding the traffic, cutting through an alley, crossing another street and through a second alley, and then running to their apartment building.
He had to slow to wait for the entry doors to slide open. He had to wait again for the lift to carry him to their eighth-floor cube. He reached their door, cursing as he fumbled at the patch over his real identification chip, finally getting it off and swiping his wrist over the all-seeing eye.
The door slid open.
Why don’t you ask your wife?
“Niobe?” he shouted her name, though he didn’t need to.
The cube wasn’t large. A small living area, a bedroom in the back on the right, a smaller bedroom ahead of it. A kitchen and bathroom on the left.
The doors to the rooms were all closed. Was she even here? It was late enough. He could have checked the rooms first, but he didn’t. He had to call the job in. That was how it worked.
He went to the comms terminal on a table in the corner. He tapped on the single button there. “Oleksy Dostoyev,” he said.
He waited a few seconds for the system to do the lookup, and then for the man to answer. Oleksy was middle-aged and balding, thin and ugly.
“Stacker,” he said. “Is it done?”
Nathan retrieved the two sticks of platinum and held them up to the screen.
“Leave them on the table. We’ll have someone pick them up in the morning.”
Nathan nodded. He put the platinum on the table in front of the terminal. Then he reached for the button to disconnect the link. He didn’t need to say anything.
“Tell your wife I said hello,” Oleksy said with a smile, just before Nathan tapped it.
The terminal went dark. Nathan’s heart rate leveled up.
“Niobe?” he shouted again. Was she here? She should have heard him the first time.
He went right to the bedroom, reaching for the door. If she wasn’t here, did that mean the Trust had taken her? If she wasn’t here, where would she be? Why?
Why don’t you ask your wife? Tell your wife I said hello.
He pushed the door open.
Chapter 3
The first thing Nathan noticed was that the window’s transparency was set to one hundred percent, offering a view into the alley below and the next apartment a few meters away. He could see across to the cube to his neighbor’s living space.
She was standing there, looking back at him, her face pale.
What was her problem?
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