Belt Three

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‘I am Gabriel Dominic Ellis Reinhardt,’ he said, slowly emphasizing each name. ‘I can trace my family tree back to people named Reinhardt and Ellis who lived on Earth. You have no such continuity. You have a serial number, clone.’

‘You’ve got a past but no future. You’re letting the human race die.’

‘True-borns are the only ones that matter.’

‘You’re letting them win!’ Keldra shouted. ‘In a few hundred years the Worldbreakers will have destroyed everything. There’ll be nowhere for us to live.’

‘There’s nothing we can do. You can’t beat the Worldbreakers. We’re living at the end of the human race.’

Keldra banged on the cell door again. ‘You should have fought!’ She disappeared from the bars and her footsteps echoed away along the corridor.

‘Don’t hurt Ayla!’ Jonas shouted after her. ‘I want her back!’

A few hours later the lights abruptly went off. Jonas lay on the bed and tried to sleep. The cell was cold but stuffy, the air not circulating properly. The faint sound he could hear resolved itself into a dozen different ship systems: rattles, hums, rhythmic thuds, and a trickle of water that sounded as though it came from just beyond the wall. There was a gentle, regular swaying sensation, as if the grav-rings were not quite properly aligned.

He still didn’t know if he had judged Keldra’s personality correctly. She seemed so volatile that he couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t forget about the ransom and slave-spike him in a fit of anger.

Six years ago he’d promised to do something worthwhile with Gabriel Reinhardt’s name. He had set out to prove that he could run a successful business while treating his tank-born employees decently, or at least better than the exploitation that was the norm. Not exactly a grand dream, now he thought about it, but even there he had failed. Gabriel Reinhardt’s uranium-mining business had survived but had not prospered. Jonas had found himself living day-to-day, plans to do more pushed to the back of his mind. Now the double blow of Worldbreaker and pirate had ended even that, his employees were dead, and there was no goal left for him but to escape and survive.

At least he had a chance of doing that. Keldra was volatile, but if he trod carefully his plan should still work. Soon he would be free, and then he could think about what to do next.

Jonas had guessed right. When another tray rattled through the slot the next morning, the face at the bars was the expressionless servitor that had been Ayla. Jonas ran up to the door. Keldra stood behind the servitor, smirking, a nerve gun in her hand.

Servitor-Ayla remained at the door after delivering the tray, giving Jonas a chance to look at her. Her face was bruised, one eye half-closed from the swelling, and he could smell blood from where Keldra had beaten her. He reminded himself that Ayla’s personality had died the moment Keldra had slave-spiked her, so she was no longer suffering, but that didn’t make the bruises any easier to look at. She had been a brilliant young woman with so much potential, but the only place his society had found for her was as a living control system for a mining hauler. Worse, she had accepted that place, humbly buying into the belief that true-borns were her natural superiors and her role was to serve them. Jonas had tried to tell her that he wasn’t better than her, but she hadn’t listened. Now his decisions had led to her personality death and the mutilation of her still-living body. At least it would soon be over and, if his plan worked, she would be avenged.

He leaned close to the bars, and let the emotion he was feeling show on his face. He had to give Keldra this triumph to make her feel secure. He glanced left and right. Keldra and Servitor-Ayla were alone in the corridor.

Keldra let out a little laugh. ‘You know, there are some theories that consciousness survives a mind-wipe. It has no control, but it can perceive what’s happening. Your Ayla could know exactly what I’ve been doing to her.’

Jonas pressed his face against the bars, and whispered.

‘Oberon.’

Servitor-Ayla blinked twice. Her original pilot implant, now running his combat programme, had a deep connection to her brain, and quickly wrested control of her body from the more recent slave implant. He stepped back from the door, and Servitor-Ayla’s eyes followed him. He nodded in Keldra’s direction.

‘Neutralize her.’

Keldra started to react, but not quickly enough. Servitor-Ayla spun around fluidly and landed a kick squarely in her stomach. As Keldra reeled, Servitor-Ayla neatly struck her hand, sending the nerve gun clattering across the corridor. Keldra swung at the servitor, but clumsily. Servitor-Ayla placed one more sharp blow to Keldra’s neck and the pirate collapsed against the wall.

Jonas grinned, triumphant.

‘Get this door open.’

He saw how the door locked when Keldra had put him in: there was nothing electronic, just a big manual lever that released the bolts. The unarmed combat programme should be able to follow his instruction.

Servitor-Ayla ducked out of sight. A second later the door swung open.

Keldra was moving sluggishly, winded but not unconscious. Jonas grabbed the nerve gun from where it had fallen, clicked the slider up to ‘kill’, and levelled it at the pirate. There was no fear in her eyes, only anger, as if she were daring him to kill her.

He closed the trigger and held it closed as Keldra convulsed, muscle spasms making her limbs flail in unnatural directions. He kept the trigger closed until she lay still. She wasn’t breathing. The nerve gun should have stopped her heart.

Jonas felt sick. The hand that held the nerve gun shook uncontrollably, and the corridor seemed to spin around him. He closed his eyes and tried to control his breathing, but when he opened them the body was still there. He should have felt pleasure at having avenged Ayla and the others, and won his chance at freedom, but all he felt were nausea and guilt. He had never killed anyone before, and now he knew he was capable of it.

He looked away from the body and managed to stop shaking and think clearly. He could reassess his moral compass later, once he knew he was safe. He looked up and down the corridor, trying to orient himself with what little he knew of a Salamander’s layout. If he reached the bridge he should be able to take control of the ship and put it on course for a friendly city. The bridge would be in the first grav-ring, and he was fairly sure he was in the second. If he headed around the ring he should come to a transport hub, eventually. He gestured Servitor-Ayla to follow him.

The bulkhead door at the end of the corridor was open. Beyond was a dim storage area, large enough that the far end was hidden behind the grav-ring’s ceiling horizon. The corridor ran between transparent partitions, on the other side of which deactivated servitors knelt in neat rows like Scriber cultists at prayer. Jonas recognized some of them as his mining servitors and the former crew of the Dancer; a few of them wore bruises where they had tried to resist capture. Their down-turned faces were corpse-like in the bluish light.

They were some way along the corridor when Jonas saw movement. A ripple of sharp twitches passed along the rows of servitors as their implants activated them. They began rising to their feet, each making the same smooth, compact movements. Doors in the partitions slid aside.

Jonas looked around in panic. Someone was in control and trying to stop him. He must have read Keldra incorrectly when he had guessed that she was the only free-willed person on the ship. He looked for controls to the partition doors, but none were visible. The servitors were on their feet now. The ends of the corridor were beyond the grav-ring ceiling horizon in both directions, so he didn’t know which end was closest. He broke into a run, towards the far end of the corridor, away from the prison cell.

The partition doors were fully open now. A servitor stepped into his path, massive hands outstretched. He had been a mining servitor, and was still wearing the Reinhardt Industries uniform. Jonas raised the nerve gun and fired. The servitor convulsed and fell, but two more were already stepping out into the corridor behind him. Their movements were uncoordinated: it looked as though they had only a basic non-combat programme. He fired wild bursts along the corridor and shouldered past the servitors as they fell.

The bulkhead door to the next corridor section was in sight now. Jonas kept firing, pushing past bodies, and fighting off clumsy, grasping hands. The door was locked, but there was a manual override behind an emergency panel. He pushed down on the lever, putting all his weight behind it. The door resisted for a moment, then sprang open, revealing a grey corridor mercifully free of servitors.

Servitor-Ayla was a few metres behind Jonas, the combat programme fighting its way through the other servitors easily, delivering swift chops precisely to their nerve points. He fired into the throng, clearing a path for her, until she was in reach, and then grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her through. He shut the door and engaged the emergency hard lock. A minute later there was a series of thuds as the servitors banged ineffectually on the door. He rested his head on the steel wall and paused for a moment, fighting to get his breathing under control.

He had reached the ring’s transit hub. The door to the transit module tube was closed, and lighted icons indicated that the modules were elsewhere in the ship. Whoever was in charge of the servitors would no doubt prevent him from recalling one. His plan for taking control of the ship had already failed. He needed a way out.

Each ring should have its own set of escape shuttles, and they were normally close to the ring’s transit hub. After a few moments Jonas found the door he needed.

The shuttle bay was cramped, with vacuum suit racks and tool lockers running along its walls. In the floor were four circular airlock hatches. Between them, through thick, foggy windows, the coffin-like shapes of the shuttles were visible, clamped in their recesses in the outer hull.

Like the doors, shuttle control had a local override, a fail-safe so that the crew could evacuate in the case of a ship-wide malfunction. There was even a local belt display based on the shuttle bay’s own lidar. At the moment it showed a binary pair of rocks, the smaller of which had a habitation beacon. Jonas grinned. If he could reach that outpost he would be home free.

An intercom on the control board crackled to life.

‘That’s as far as you get, true-born.’ The voice was breathless and uneven, but it was Keldra’s. She sounded as if she was running.

Jonas leaned in to the intercom. ‘How did you survive?’

‘This ship won’t let me die.’

He stabbed the controls to prep one of the shuttles for launch. ‘I’ve got shuttle control. You can’t stop me leaving.’

‘I’ve got fire control. If you launch one of those shuttles I’ll blow it out of space.’

He hesitated. ‘You wouldn’t. You want me alive for ransom.’

‘You think I make empty threats?’

A chime sounded to signal that launch prep was done, and a hatch hissed open. Jonas stared at the cramped, cocoon-like space beyond. With the system running on local override, there was no way to launch a shuttle except from inside it.

Servitor-Ayla was standing behind him, obedient and alert, the combat programme scanning the room for threats to its master. Her face was expressionless; the woman behind it was already dead.

‘Servitor,’ Jonas said slowly, ‘go into that shuttle and use the launch control.’

Servitor-Ayla paused, and, for a moment, Jonas thought that the command to launch a shuttle had been too complex for the combat programme, but then she walked forward and climbed through the hatch. Jonas watched through the floor window as the clamps released and the shuttle fell away from the hull, drifting to one side as the Coriolis effect took it away from the shuttle bay. Ayla was visible momentarily through the tiny filtered window, before the thrusters fired and the shuttle dwindled to a point.

A missile streaked across the window. The shuttle exploded into a million glittering shards.

Jonas punched the side of the control panel in frustration. Now there was nowhere he could run. Involuntarily, he thought back to what Keldra had said about consciousness surviving a mind-wipe. He knew it wasn’t true, but if it was, then letting her destroy Ayla’s body had been the most merciful thing.

The door from the corridor opened. Jonas turned just in time to see Keldra powering across the floor towards him. Before he could move she grabbed his throat and slammed him against the wall.

‘You don’t steal from a thief.’

He wriggled in her grip. She pulled upwards, choking him and nearly lifting him off his feet. A pair of burly servitors entered behind her and trained their nerve guns on him.

‘You don’t steal from a thief,’ she repeated. ‘You steal from a business owner, they have insurance, they have law enforcement. They have their true-born family to help them out. A thief doesn’t have all that.’ Her grip tightened, making his eyes water. ‘You steal from a thief and they’ll hunt you down and kill you as a warning to everyone else, because you don’t steal from a thief. You don’t steal from me.’ She released him and he doubled over, gasping. ‘Why didn’t you wait? I could ransom you to your family. That’s the way this normally goes.’

Jonas lay against the wall, feeling his throat. He could taste blood in his mouth. The game was up; she had already shown she was prepared to kill him rather than let him escape. He might as well tell the truth for once.

‘I’m not a true-born,’ he croaked.

Keldra delivered a swift kick to his ribs. ‘What’s your name, clone?’

‘Jonas 2477-Athens-20219, Administrator.’

She kicked him again, less hard this time. ‘Bastard. I lost a good shuttle because of you.’ She looked down at him, calculating. ‘What happened? How’d you get where you are?’

‘Gabriel Reinhardt was a Scriber. He Immolated six years ago. The Belt Three branch of Reinhardt Industries should have passed to his next of kin, but…’

‘You took over.’ She smiled slyly. Was that admiration Jonas saw on her face, or did she just like the thought of a true-born family being screwed over?

‘I was his personal assistant, so I had access to nearly everything,’ he said. ‘I fired all the staff who knew his face, and rebuilt the business. His family’s up in Belt Four. He didn’t talk to them much, and they never knew he was a Scriber.’

‘But if I ransomed you to them, they’d know you weren’t him. Hah.’ Keldra was still looking thoughtful, as if sizing him up for something. ‘You’d still have been living like that if that Worldbreaker hadn’t shown up. You must hate the Worldbreakers.’

‘Hate the Worldbreakers?’ Jonas looked up, incredulous, trying to work out if she was serious. ‘I hate you, you damn pirate! There’s no point hating the Worldbreakers. They’re just there. There’s nothing we can do about them.’

Keldra grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him to his feet, her eyes flaring with a resurgence of anger. ‘No point. Nothing we can do,’ she mimicked acidly. She thrust his face into the local belt display. ‘Do you know what that rock is?’

The local belt display showed two bodies near the Remembrance of Clouds. One of them was flagged as having a habitation beacon, but the display did not show any more information; the other was dark, visible only as a lidar trace. A pair of rocks orbiting a common centre, one of which was inhabited: any number of outposts in the belts matched that description.

‘What? No. It could be anywhere.’

‘It’s LN-411.’

‘But LN-411’s a lone rock, it doesn’t have…oh God.’ An awful chill ran through his body, quite different from the mundane fear of enslavement by a pirate. The other rock was the Worldbreaker.