Chapter 1
Mech
Jake Price swapped out his assault rifle’s empty magazine for a full one, sucked in a quick breath, and leaned to fire around the low garden wall that served as his only cover. A tight burst, and then back again. His ammo was almost depleted.
The Ixan soldiers were closing in, and they’d already taken out the rest of Jake’s team.
Of course, today wouldn’t have gone half so poorly if his dropship pilot hadn’t insisted on putting his team down in the middle of an open square bordered by Ixan snipers. Jake had lost half his people as they tried to sprint across the open space, zigzagging to give themselves a nonzero chance of survival.
Right now, his chance of surviving seemed pretty close to zero. But he’d been in tighter spots than this.
And he had to complete the mission.
Ripping a grenade from his tactical vest, he lobbed it at the approaching soldiers as he scrambled the other way, staying low to the ground and praying he wasn’t kicking up enough dust to give away his location.
When he judged he’d put enough distance between himself and his original position, he flipped onto his back, ripped his pistol from its holster, and waited.
There. The Ixa started coming around the wall, fleeing the impending explosion. Jake inhaled, lined up his shot, and fired as he exhaled.
Boom. Headshot. Boom. Headshot.
Jake was already up and running as the grenade went off, rumbling through the ground and sending a wave of heat against his back.
His mission was to rescue a diplomat who’d been foolish enough to try negotiating with the Ixa. They’d taken him hostage, of course, and then the demands had started.
The Commonwealth needed to send a strong message: they weren’t interested in entertaining Ixan demands.
And Jake was the messenger they’d chosen.
Intel had the hostage in a basement two streets over, and an indicator blinked on Jake’s HUD, with a dotted line outlining a suggested route.
Screw that.
Following the AI’s suggestion meant staying predictable. Instead, Jake tried a door, and when it wouldn’t open, he slapped a charge just above its doorknob, taking cover behind a nearby dumpster.
The charge went off, and the door creaked open. Perfect. Now, if he could just…
“Jake.” Someone shaking his shoulder. “Jake, come on. We’ve arrived. Time to work.”
He opened his eyes to the gunmetal gray of the tiny cabin he shared with his father aboard their comet hopper.
As it often did, reality brought a resigned sigh to his lips. “I was about to get a hostage back from the Ixa.”
“The Ixa aren’t here. I’m here, though, and I’m telling you it’s time to clock in.”
“They could come,” Jake muttered as he sat up, blinking rapidly to clear his grainy eyes.
“Not in time to get you out of work,” Peter said with a grin. Then his smile fell away. “You were jolting in your sleep again. I think you’re spending too much time lucid, Jake. It’s not worth sacrificing your sleep for.”
“It’ll be worth it if the Ixa ever show up.”
“Sure,” Peter said, nodding. “Or the Gok, or Amblers, or maybe the Quatro will develop spaceflight to come out here and pester us. Until they do, though…”
“Yeah, yeah.” His father wasn’t mentioning what the single orbital telescope in this system had discovered: the fact that almost all of the nearby star systems had exoplanets with atmospheres filled with oxygen, carbon dioxide, and methane—which made it pretty likely those planets harbored life.
People living in the Steele System barely ever mentioned that. It made them uncomfortable, so they avoided the topic. They especially didn’t mention that the flux of one star in particular often dropped to below the twenty percent level, for periods that ranged between five and eighty days at a time. On the system net, Jake had seen speculation that the unusual fluctuations could signify a Dyson sphere under construction.
Either way, Darkstream Security didn’t dare explore the surrounding systems, for fear that it would alert their occupants—who might be much more powerful—to humanity’s presence in the neighborhood. At least, Darkstream wouldn’t do that until they achieved a much better foothold here.
Jake crouched beside his bunk to access the long drawer underneath it, pulling it out until the handle hit his father’s closed drawer under the opposite bunk. Piles of neatly folded work shirts and jeans waited inside. His father made him fold them neatly every time he steamed them clean, and then Jake had to arrange the clothing according to outfits. Even when they were in transit between work sites, his father enforced neatness.
“Did we get any messages from Mom and Sue Anne?” Jake asked.
He glanced to see his father shaking his head. “Not this morning,” Peter Price said softly, after a brief pause.
Jake nodded, reflecting that no news was probably good news. If Sue Anne’s illness had taken a sudden turn for the worse, then they would have heard about it.
Even though they’d disembarked the comet hopper hundreds of times, Peter insisted they triple-check every clip and fastening on each other’s pressure suits before leaving through the airlock.
With his helmet on, Jake sighed again, loudly, knowing his father couldn’t hear. He hated this job. He’d never say that, because they did it to help Sue Anne, but this wasn’t how he’d envisioned spending his life. Turning comets into habitats, for homesteaders so paranoid that it wasn’t good enough Darkstream Security had already brought them far away from every government in existence. No, the homesteaders still weren’t satisfied—they still felt the need to get away from Darkstream itself.
Although the comet’s surface was almost as cold as anything ever got—Jake’s HUD told him minus two hundred and forty Celsius—the inside of the pressure suit could be made as warm as he liked. If he wanted, he could make it feel like his whole body was pressed against a radiator.
But that would make work even more unbearable, so he kept the suit’s environment fairly cool.
“Come help me with the hose,” his father said over the frequency they always used, walking over to the hopper’s hull and keying open a square panel that took up much of the aft. The panel slid aside to reveal a coiled drilling hose. The thing was half a kilometer long and as big around as a man’s ankle.
“Where are we setting up?” Jake asked.
Peter pointed. “That flat area over there.”
As his father unwound the hose, Jake walked with its end toward the indicated spot. It was more shuffling than walking, actually. If you had too much bounce in your step as you crossed a comet, you could easily fly off into space.
His father had activated the water harvester before leaving the hopper. That device projected downward from the ship’s keel, where it would heat the ice and collect the resultant water before it could freeze again. As water passed through the system, the ship would warm it further, till it was piping hot.
“That’s far enough,” his father said, and Jake lowered the hose to the ground. They’d have to wait thirty minutes for the ship to heat up enough liquid. In the meantime, Jake helped his father extend the hopper’s antenna array from another part of the hull. The array would use step-frequency radar to gradually scan the comet’s interior, so they could anticipate any problem spots during the drill down.
That done, it was time to stand around and wait. Even if he’d been able to go lucid, he doubted his father would have let him. But you needed an implant for that anyway, and all Jake had was the dorky-looking sleepgear.
His eyes played over their comet hopper, which didn’t technically have a name, though he always thought of it as the Whale. The name fit: the thing was big. It had to be, to carry the equipment necessary to set up multiple comet colonies.
They were on a years-long voyage to establish several such habitats, hopping from comet to comet. Anything smaller than a mile wide didn’t interest them, but luckily there were more than enough suitable candidates for colonization in what had originally been dubbed the Kuiper Belt 2, and those candidates passed near each other often enough to make the whole operation viable.
No one was sure whether the same was true of the Outer Ring, since it was far enough outside the normal sphere of operations that it made no sense to expand there until Kuiper Belt 2 was fully exploited, which it wouldn’t be for a long time.
Eventually, everyone dropped the “2” in Kuiper Belt 2. No one who’d followed Darkstream to this galaxy intended on having any more contact with the inhabitants of humanity’s home system, and so using the same name wasn’t likely to become a problem.
Even so, nowadays, most people simply called the circumstellar disk “the Belt.”
Darkstream Security Ltd. supplied Jake and his father with the equipment and building materials necessary to erect each colony, in exchange for sixty percent of all resources extracted as well as fifty percent of the sales they made to homesteaders.
It was kind of funny to think about how the homesteaders wanted so badly to get away from Darkstream, and yet without the company they’d never be able to—
“Jake.”
Jake’s head jerked up, until he was looking at his father, whose hand was raised in a gesture recognizable as one used to manipulate a virtual interface.
“Yeah?”
“Radar found something odd. I think…I think there’s something inside this thing.”
“The comet?”
“Yeah. Take a look at this.” With a flicking gesture, Peter sent the radar image to Jake’s HUD.
So far, the antenna array had only managed to render part of the object buried deep within the ice of the comet, but Jake thought he recognized it nevertheless. He’d never seen one in person, of course, because they didn’t actually exist.
Or so he’d thought. And yet, here one was. He’d piloted simulated versions himself, many times, while lucid. But here one was in real life.
An actual mech. Buried deep within the comet’s ice.
Chapter 2
The Dusty Bucket
“The usual, Lisa?” Phineas Gage asked when she sauntered up to the bar.
Lisa Sato nodded, using her implant to summon the pile of silver and copper coins that represented her financial worth in credits. It hovered in the air, waiting for her to count out the right change from it. She did so, and pinched some extra copper from the top, dropping it onto the bar in front of Phineas.
The bartender grinned, eyeing the added coin through his v-lenses. Lisa believed in tipping generously. Darkstream paid its military operatives well—much better than most other employees, as well as most of those the company contracted with. Spreading the extra coin around a bit was the least she could do.
“Can I have your number, Lisa?” Bob O’Toole singsonged drunkenly from the bar’s end.
She suppressed a grimace, avoiding O’Toole’s gaze. The gross old man had never tried anything with her, and if he did he’d live to regret it. But he did have a knack for being annoying.
“Getting her number wouldn’t help you one iota, Bob,” said Tessa Notaras, who sat with her hands curled around a beer between Lisa and the old lech. “Even if you managed to get her number, IM address, and employee ID, she still wouldn’t sleep with you.”
Bob might have come back with something saucy, but Tessa had paired her words with a stern glare, and the drunk fell silent. Then Tessa turned to smile at Lisa.
Lisa smiled back. She often shared a drink with Tessa, and she liked the older woman a lot. Tessa always seemed to have something interesting to share, whether it was a rumor no one had heard yet, but which would inevitably be all over Habitat 2 by the next day, or an intriguing tidbit from one of the books she spent so much time reading on her implant.
Tessa had also worked for Darkstream, once, but now she seemed to revile the company. That made it a little awkward whenever Lisa’s employer came up in conversation. Lisa had no idea how the ex-soldier made money now that she’d estranged herself from the biggest company in the system, but it didn’t really matter. Tessa had come to play something of a “big sister” role to Lisa.
“Here you go, darling,” Phineas said, plunking a whiskey sour on the bar top in front of her.
Lisa raised the glass to her lips, sipped in some foam, and tilted the tumbler toward Phineas. “Delicious as always, Phin.”
“Better than the Swinging Eel?” he asked, voice flush with mirth.
That got a laugh from Lisa. “You know I’d never betray your trust by patronizing them.”
It was true. Of Habitat 2’s two bars, the Swinging Eel was by far the seedier one, and especially dangerous for a Darkstream Security operative. Lisa far preferred to drink here at the Dusty Bucket, even if Bob O’Toole did seem to cling permanently to his customary stool like an unpleasant growth.
I wonder if anyone would dare sit on that stool, if he ever got up from it. I bet it’s filthy. The thought made her grin wider. Maybe a newcomer would. Habitat 2 didn’t get many of those.
Settling onto her own stool, Lisa cast her mind back over the day she’d had, which had involved busting two in-progress drug deals. Those were getting more frequent, lately, and they’d already been pretty bad. Her entire job seemed to boil down to arresting people whose crimes had something to do with drugs—smuggling them, selling them, buying them, or stealing enough credits to buy them.
It never ends.
Andy Miller entered the bar, nodding at Phineas before noticing Lisa.
“Seaman Apprentice,” she said, with a slight nod.
“Seaman,” Andy said, smirking.
Andy was a fellow Darkstream employee, and so he had a rank, like her. The company had given its hired military operatives naval ranks soon after deciding to colonize this solar system, to increase their perceived legitimacy as the closest thing the system had to a military.
Lisa had heard that Darkstream wasn’t quite as finicky about ranks as the UHF had been back in the Milky Way, but the command structure was still taken seriously.
Lisa had gone on a couple of dates with Andy a few months ago, but suddenly he’d stopped messaging her, and so she’d stopped messaging him. Now, he treated her with a mixture of ridicule and disdain whenever they saw each other. She wasn’t a fan of that at all.
“Just getting back from a run, Andy?” Phineas asked, sliding over a pint of stout.
Andy nodded. “Brought a big shipment back from the elevator, too.”
Phineas grunted. “Thing makes me nervous. I don’t care how far away they put it. I hear that thing is over twenty thousand miles high, and if something ever went wrong with it and it fell over the wrong way…”
A sharp laugh from Andy. “It’ll never fall over, Phin. The physics are as dependable as your beer is good.”
“Ah. Well, they must be pretty dependable, then.” Still, Phineas sniffed sharply. “How’s the weather out on Alex?”
“Could be a lot worse.”
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