Chapter 9
Gates were funny things. Sometimes you really couldn’t get there from here. Though humanity had built hundreds of gates now, there were only five that had the proper angles to transit into the Swindle system. To avoid interference between those, each of the five arrival areas had a separate entry zone, which was a sphere as many thousands of kilometers in diameter as needed to accommodate the exit variance. All the zones were well outside the planetary plane.
Of course, all of them were watched.
There was no way to hide the sudden heat signature that appeared at the end of a transit. In the cold of space, a radiating ship was practically a glowing beacon. The only real way to hide a ship was in plain sight, which was the Tar Heel’s forte.
There were five paths into the Swindle system, but only one gate out. The place just hadn’t been worth the investment until recently. The exit zone from the Nivaas system followed Swindle closely in its orbit. At normal speeds, it would take Tar Heel about five days to catch up to the planet. They were going to make it in three, because the captain was really eager to get this transaction over with. The crew was happy to push it, because every one of them was set to make a killing on their portion of the sale. After this, Jackson would have enough saved up to buy himself a modest little barge if he wanted to. Not that he’d decided to make the jump to owner-operator just yet, because he still wasn’t convinced the captain was actually going to go through with his retirement plans.
Jackson was into kilometer two of his daily run around the eternal corridor with Tui and a few of the crew when the intercom told him to report to Shade’s office.
With his shirt stained with sweat he wasn’t exactly presentable, but she’d just have to deal with it. The captain and Shade were already there waiting for him. Though she didn’t really have an official place in the ship’s hierarchy, Shade had the second biggest cabin on the Tar Heel. It was part business office, and also her living quarters, along with her two bearded dragons. They were huge things, two and a half feet long at least. One was white, the other a deep red. They were sitting on a desk that folded out of the wall, tails draping off the side.
“You sent for me, Captain?”
“I did.” He gestured at the chair next to him. “Have a seat.”
Shade pulled a live cricket out of a little tub and held it out by its leg. The red lizard reached up and nipped it out of her hand, crunched it, and swallowed. That one’s name was Ares. There was a little storage room dedicated to Shade’s bugs. One time her hornworms had gotten out and disappeared who knows where. A few months later, moths had begun to fly about the habitat ring. It was amazing how much nonsense the captain would put up with, provided you made him enough money.
“We were just discussing how we’re going to go about meeting with the buyer. I’m going to send the Tar Heel to the League port at Raste.”
The little station above the dead planet Raste belonged to the League of Merchants. The league was supposedly independent, but ultimately answered to the ISF, the International Space Federation, the eight-hundred-pound gorilla that managed the exploration of stars and allotment of land claims for this section of the galaxy.
The ISF made laws and had its own courts, law enforcement, and military, all of which their client brazenly defied.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Jackson asked.
“We’re sure,” Shade said. “Our client might take it as an insult docking at Raste instead of Big Town, but it’s insurance.”
“You think he might try to rip us off?”
The captain shrugged. “I think the only reason he’s not done that before is because we were more valuable to him still alive and making deliveries.”
“The Warlord is a very intelligent man,” Shade said. “He does nothing without a cost/benefit analysis.”
“I was gonna say he knows not to kill the goose who lays the golden egg.”
Shade’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “I’m not familiar with that saying, Captain. You tend to lose me with your bits of folksy Earth wisdom, but I can gather the context. Yes, in the past it benefited the Warlord for us to continue doing business. However, this is the most valuable shipment we’ve ever brought him. He may conclude it’s easier to just seize it rather than pay for it.”
Jackson nodded. “Makes sense. So you arrange your deal, get paid, and then we transfer the goods. You want me to fly the Tar Heel to Raste?”
“Naw, that’s why I called you in here. Castillo will be in charge of the ship. I want you to come with us to meet the client.”
“To meet the Warlord?” Jackson laughed. “Aw, come on, Cap. You know I’m not good with people.”
“Yep,” Captain Holloway said. “Believe me, I know.”
Shade held out another cricket to her dragons. This time the white dragon took it and gave it a munch, the cricket’s legs kicking a bit before it disappeared. That one’s name was Zeus. “Previously, we simply dropped the containers with their requested items into orbit, and they wired us the funds. It has been an acceptable arrangement with minimum exposure for both parties. This shipment, however, will require a face-to-face negotiation. You know more about ground combat hardware than anyone else aboard. The Warlord likes his toys. You two can talk shop.”
“I can talk mechs,” Jackson grudgingly agreed with her. He’d spent a lot of time over the last few days inspecting their new prize, and it had confirmed his initial impression, that the Citadel was the finest mech he’d ever seen. If they’d had a few of those on Gloss, it would be a free planet today instead of a third-class suck pit.
“We want you to solidify the relationship,” she said. “Talk up the finer points of the Citadel. Compare it to the other models we’ve delivered him.”
Jackson had never been to the surface of Swindle, but he’d heard legends about how bad it was. The workers down there needed mechs to protect them from the giant wildlife, only the ISF—in their infinite bureaucratic wisdom—had declared military tech off-limits to these people. Luckily for the workers of Swindle, the captain didn’t much care for those sorts of rules.
Since the beginning of their business relationship the Warlord had become something of a collector. He’d accumulated five mechs from them, but the Citadel was something new. Something far more responsive and flexible than anything he’d probably seen before.
“You want me to butter him up.”
“We want you to make him drool,” the captain said.
Jackson nodded. “If he knows anything about mechs, this thing sells itself.”
“He does,” Shade said. “He’s a mech pilot too.”
“Really? Manual control?”
“Linked.”
Jackson whistled. “Impressive.” That was a pretty elite fraternity. It took a special kind of brain to seamlessly perceive a walking tank as your own body, and only a small percentage of those could accept the implants.
“See? You’re practically a brother from another mother. Talk shop, and help seal the deal,” the captain said. “So you’ll go with us in the striker to Big Town while the Tar Heel continues on to Raste. The striker holds six, so we’ll take Tui and two of his men. More than enough for a friendly meeting with a longtime customer. If he’s in a good mood, we should be able to move everything we’ve got. And I mean everything.”
They had procured a whole lot of controlled items and illegal goodies on this run. The Citadel was just the really expensive cherry on top.
“That’s a big payday,” Jackson said.
“Huge.”
“I like huge,” said Shade.
“On the other hand,” the captain continued, “if he thinks we’re working for one of the factions who want to muscle in on his operation, we’ll be taking a short trip out of an airlock.”
“Airlocks are too dull for the Warlord,” Shade said. “His justice usually involves a trip to the surface with cameras and betting to see just how long the idiot who got caught survives.”
“What’s the record?” Jackson asked.
Shade shrugged. She didn’t have time for blood sports. There was business to conduct.
“We shouldn’t have any problems,” the captain said. “He knows what we traffic in, so he’ll assume the Tar Heel is better armed than it looks. If he gets to feeling treacherous, it’s not like he’s in some hardened facility a thousand feet below ground. He’s in an orbital. A big fat whale, floating on a predictable course. So it’s in everyone’s interest to play nice.”
“There’s no way in hell you’d ever give the order to open fire on an orbital with hundreds of thousands of innocent people living on it.”
“Of course not,” the captain said. “But the client doesn’t know that.”
Shade waved off the conversation about obliterating the orbital. “There are many ways to use nukes. That’s not what I’m worried about. I’m worried about flyboy here.” She looked directly at Jackson and narrowed her eyes. “Don’t screw this up like you did on Nivaas.”
Irritation rose in Jackson, but there was nothing to be gained by fighting with her now, so Jackson held his tongue.
“I don’t trust the guy. Hell, his people literally only call him Warlord for goodness’ sake, so he ain’t exactly cuddly. However, he’s kept his people alive in a godforsaken place, and he’s done it all while thumbing his nose at the ISF, which I can respect. We get in, we close this deal. It’s my last hurrah. With a nice fat parting bonus for the whole crew if everything goes right.”
Jackson didn’t know exactly what all was in inventory, but he’d helped steal enough of it to have a pretty good idea. The share payout on all of it was going to be big, add a bonus on top of that, and it put the dream of being an independent operator within reach, and not just of some crappy rock hopper, but an actual decent ship. Two months from now he could be Captain Jackson.
* * *
Jane was hacking into the security system of the league station above Raste when a red flower icon appeared on her visual.
She selected the flower and watched a video of a beach with an older couple on it. The sun was setting, the tide going out, the waves crashing on the rocks. There were trails of footprints walking along the edge of the surf line. The whole place was strewn with the detritus from a storm. In the distance, garbage bots were cleaning and grooming the sand.
The image was from her homeworld. A land of order and unmatched technological knowledge, which kept itself purposefully separated from the lesser branches of humanity.
Jane never talked about where she was from to the other members of the crew. It was safer for them that way. Only this was no mere postcard to remind her of her childhood. It was another coded message from her sister. Jane deciphered its hidden meaning within seconds.
The new threat hunting them wasn’t from the Iyer, or the Boroughs. This was something new, yet familiar. And her sister had nearly been hacked. Nobody ever got close to hacking the girls of Mary 231.78, especially not their 22nd sister, who was smart and careful and always covered her tracks. She was the one who had initially devised their secret language. Hacking her would be like trying to hack the wind.
It had been several years since any of Savat’s hounds had gotten this close to catching one of them. Since there were only a handful of people in the universe who could do what she did, as well as she could, she would have to be extra careful not to leave any trace. If the hunters got closer, she would have to disappear again and start over with a new identity somewhere else. She didn’t want to do that. This ship was her home now. For the first time in her life Jane had made real human friends. Normally she had to build them.
* * *
The next day they boarded the striker—one of the two smaller ships the Tar Heel carried—and strapped themselves in. When everything was a go, they engaged the electric pushers that nudged them away from the hull. When there was enough separation, the captain turned the striker so the wash wouldn’t blast the other ship, then engaged the thrusters. Though half of them aboard were certified to fly a striker, the captain had claimed the stick, probably for the fun of it.
While the little striker accelerated toward Big Town, the Tar Heel continued on without them. She was kind of pretty, in a big, awkward, lumbering sort of way.
“That’s one majestic lady,” the captain said wistfully as his ship grew tiny in the distance. Jackson exchanged a look with Tui, but neither of them said anything. Only a handful of the crew knew about their captain’s planned retirement, but all of those had already started a betting pool on how long his self-exile back to Earth would last.
“Alright ladies and gentlemen, Big Town, ETA three hours.” Once the Tar Heel was just one of a million dots in the sky, the captain turned his chair around to face the compartment where the rest of them were strapped in. “You all know the basics, but Shade, would you make sure everyone knows enough about the political niceties of this deal so they can avoid screwing it up?”
She looked over at Tui and his handpicked goons, Katze and Bushey, and then finally at Jackson. “I don’t know if I have the time or the crayons sufficient to do so.”
“She means you,” Tui fake whispered loud enough so everyone would hear anyway. “I’m educated.”
“Yeah, but you got a degree in philosophy,” Jackson muttered back.
“Gotta love correspondence courses.” Then Tui turned back to their broker. “Don’t worry. The captain asked me to pick only the sharpest and most diplomatic members of my security force for this mission.”
“Thanks, Chief,” said Katze.
“But since I didn’t have anyone sharp or diplomatic available, I chose these two. Shade, this is Katze Yeager,” he nodded toward the female goon. “And Mike Bushey,” the male. “Trust me, despite appearances, they’ll do.”
Jackson had enjoyed working with both of them. Katze Yeager was younger and relatively new to the crew, Mike Bushey was older and been with them for a few years, but they were both vets, and like Tui, they’d both been gene-modded and cybernetically augmented by the militaries they’d served with. Katze had been an Amonite marine, and Bushey, a sergeant in the Earth Force Infantry. Though the crew of the Tar Heel mostly tried to avoid outright conflict, the captain liked having a few dedicated trigger pullers on the payroll. Tui had twelve people on his security team, most of whom never had anything to do with Grandma if they could help it.
“Thank you, Chief Fuamatu,” said the captain. “Now get on with it, Shade.”
“Very well. Our buyer is this man.” Shade activated the holo projector on her wrist. The image was obviously a propaganda shot, showing a very handsome black man, lean, bearded, with way too many medals on his uniform. “This is Warlord.”
Katze spoke up. “Warlord? No the? No title? Just Warlord?”
“That’s all anyone calls him,” Shade said.
“He actually doesn’t have a name?” Katze asked.
“That is his name. Nobody knows what he was called before. All we know is the story he painted of himself when he seized control of Swindle. He was drafted to be a child soldier on Earth but worked his way up the ranks and survived the Ghana Wars. Afterwards he emigrated here in search of a better life. Came with his sister. Because of the implants he’d gotten from the Africa Pact, he got a job protecting harvesters down on the surface. When the corrupt territorial government fell to pieces, and his sister was killed during the food riots, he rose up and defeated the lawless gangs who had turned everything to chaos.”
As Shade spoke, the pictures flipped through a slide show, but every image of Warlord was either a stylized piece of artwork, a propaganda shot, or an election poster. It was apparent that he maintained a very well-cultivated image.
“Warlord brought peace, order, and prosperity to Big Town, saving hundreds of thousands from death in the process. He’s the hero of the orbital, and he’s run this place with an iron fist ever since.”
“Huh,” Katze said, not satisfied.
“Yeah, one of those types.” Bushey had seen plenty of dictators. “I’m sure he bleeds like the rest of us.”
“Maybe,” Tui said. “You never know what kinds of mods he’s got.”
“This is a friendly visit,” the captain said. “You’ll need to smile, Bushey.”
Bushey smiled. It was a slightly hideous thing.
“Tremendous,” the captain said. “We’ll make sure to put you out front when the shooting starts.”
The others chuckled. Except for Shade, who just kind of scowled, and then continued her briefing.
“That’s the official version of events. In reality, I can confirm almost nothing about him. The faction he fought for collapsed, and their record keeping was spotty even before that. His personal infosec is top tier. Not even Jane could crack it. Compared to the gangs who fought over Big Town after the territorial government collapsed, he’s probably an improvement. From all available intel his rule is strict, but the people are decently cared for. He keeps getting reelected…by an inevitable landslide, with a hundred and ten percent voter turnout.”
“He sounds like a real peach,” said Katze.
“Actually, he’s rather charming in person. However, this is where it gets interesting.” The image changed to an extremely complicated looking chemical compound. “This is CX. I won’t confuse Jackson by trying to pronounce its actual name. What you need to know is that it’s very costly to synthesize, but is required in large quantities for gate operation, which makes it an exceedingly valuable commodity. The precursor agents are only found in a handful of places in known space. Swindle is one of them.”
“But it’s not like the others.” said the captain. “Swindle’s has the highest quality.”
Shade changed the holo to a map of the sector. There were a lot of different color border lines clashing here. “After the territorial government was deposed, the ISF, the Syndicate, and the Pact all made claims on this system.”
Their broker waited for that to sink in, because those were the three most powerful alliances in human history. As mankind had spread across the stars, most new worlds had remained independent, but a few had united to form powerful defensive coalitions. When superpowers butted heads, things could get very ugly.
“It’s currently listed as a disputed territory on the registry of planets and Big Town isn’t recognized as a legitimate government by anyone respectable. Hence the arms embargo. However, should one of the major powers attempt to take Swindle by force, the others would have no choice but to send fleets in response. If the flow of Swindlen CX is interrupted, it could have dire economic ramifications, so they each only keep a token presence here.”
“Let me guess,” said Bushey. “As long as the Warlord keeps CX production up, selling to all of them, the superpowers are happy to keep it to a cold war, and they leave him alone to run his little kingdom.”
“Very good,” said Shade. “And if Warlord were to openly side with any of them, the other two competitors would be forced to act. So he plays all three…You’re smarter than I originally assumed, Mr. Bushey.”
“Eh, you do enough merc contracts for dictators, you learn their games.”
Tui said, “No offense, Captain, but I gotta ask. Why’d you decide to start doing business with this guy? I thought the policy was to support each individual’s right to protect themselves and their property, governments be damned. Ruthless dictators aren’t our normal customers.”
That was the code. And the captain did more than give lip service to that ideal—he’d risked life and limb to make sure others had the tools they needed to defend themselves.
“Show them the thing, Shade.”
She flipped the holo. From the way the viewpoint was bobbing along, and the labored breathing, this clip was obviously from a helmet cam, and whoever was wearing it was running for their life. The view flashed across rough terrain, craggy rocks, and roots so gigantic they had to be climbed over. When the camera panned up, it showed a thick canopy of supermassive branches, densely covered in colorful leaves.
“This is from the surface of Swindle. You can find raw CX on other worlds, but it is exceedingly rare, and always lower quality. But on Swindle, it’s comparatively common and pure, the result of a complicated biological process by an organism that lives on the bark of those trees. A process that nobody has been able to replicate anywhere else. Thus, teams of harvesters drop down to the surface to collect the CX, and then get out of there as fast as they can, because of—”
Then there was an earsplitting screech from the holo, so primal and angry it made Jackson instinctively flinch.
“Those,” Shade finished.
The camera jerked up as something incomprehensibly large leapt between the trees. Despite being so vast, it was lightning quick. Jackson had seen elephants and mammoths grown from the original Earth DNA in person. This thing appeared to be far bigger than that but ran and jumped like a monkey. There was a flash of what had to be meter-long mandibles, as the camera was scooped up, the harvester thrashing through the air, and dropped, screaming, into what looked like a circular pit of quivering knives. Shade paused it there.
“That’s a mouth,” Katze said incredulously. “Those are teeth.”
“Yes. And you can be thankful I stopped before the mastication process started. It’s rather…grisly.”
“Dear lord,” said Tui.
“I doubt your god dwells on the surface of Swindle, Mr. Fuamatu,” said Shade. “It’s a rather unpleasant place.”
The captain laughed. “That right there should accentuate why I decided to start running weapons to these folks. Believe it or not, I’m told that one’s medium-sized. They also come in large, extra-large, and jumbo. Workers were going down to pick flowers in hell no matter what. Their casualty rate was insane, but since the pay’s good there are always more hungry immigrants from Earth showing up to replace them. The only thing the ISF had allowed these people for protection down there were some old, worn out, T7 Jackals.”
Jackson just shook his head. Those were light scout mechs from the Africa Pact. They were relatively fast, but their armament was negligible, and they were fragile enough that whatever that thing was in the video, it would pop them like a grape. Something as tough as the Citadel on the other hand…As fast as that creature appeared to be, you’d want to jack in—fly-by-mind—to be able to chase that thing, bounding from tree to tree, total commitment, fire and fury. It would be a challenge, a real hunt to remember…But then he dismissed that tempting thought, because those days were behind him. He was never going to risk plugging in again.
“Shade introduced us a few years back. Warlord made his case. Screw the ISF and their silly rules. So I started selling them stuff, though nothing nearly as advanced as what we’ve scored this trip. With proper kit, fewer workers get eaten, and we get paid. It’s been a good arrangement. And now Warlord’s got himself quite the shopping list, most of which we can check off with this shipment.”
They accelerated toward Swindle until they were doing close to a hundred and thirty-two thousand kilometers per hour. The planet was easy to pick out from this distance. It was a much larger dot than all the surrounding dots. It also had a slight green tinge. Sensing their curiosity, the captain enlarged the view of the planet on the main display. It was covered with swirls of white and green clouds with red-and-brown-flecked land peeking up from below. The oceans were so blue they were nearly purple.
“So it is as nasty as they say,” Katze muttered.
“A literal nightmare world,” Shade answered, “with a caustic, poisonous atmosphere, extreme temperature swings, violent storms, and best of all, incredibly deadly wildlife.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“Sounds like a party,” the captain said. “Time for lunch.”
They broke out the bags. Tui added some of his favorite snacks, little squares of chocolate with a sweet ant paste inside that was supposed to be a delicacy in the Xindalu system. They tossed the bag around in the weightless environment, enjoying the ant creams. Everyone except Shade partook. She was too busy reviewing the inventory they’d procured. She kept running her hands through her short pale hair, probably trying to decide how much she could get away with overcharging Warlord.
While he ate, Jackson got curious, pulled up the guidebook entry on Swindle, and started reading.
The planet’s official name was Lush, or at least that was the name the exploration company who had discovered it had registered it as. They’d sent back glowing reports. Pictures of waterfalls three hundred meters high. Stunning woodlands, plains, lakes, and rivers. Sunsets on magnificent beaches. Huge parts of the planet, the official report claimed, were a veritable Eden.
The citizens of the poor, overpopulated, and crowded countries of Earth had rejoiced, as they did every time a habitable planet was found.
Exploration companies got paid in shares of whatever they discovered. They sold the tracts they’d been granted and made a huge profit. The rest of the planet was ceded to various countries by the rules of the International Space Federation. The countries then distributed their claims or sold them off according to their individual laws. Soon millions of people had been buying, selling, and trading tracts of land on a planet that only about a dozen explorers had actually seen with their own eyes.
Eventually three settlement companies formed to fund the construction of colony ships to Lush. One was big enough to hold a hundred thousand people. Many spent their life savings to buy a claim, supplies, and pay for the journey. The broke and desperate bonded themselves out. They made their epic journey through the five gates, eager to claim their slice of paradise.
Except when they arrived, they found that the reports were a fraud.
Oh, it was as beautiful as the photos made it out to be. The exploration company had merely omitted some inconvenient facts, like how the atmosphere was breathable in only the most tortured sense of the word, and how everything that lived there wanted to kill you.
“Wow, these people got screwed.” Jackson closed the page, then asked Shade, “Did they ever find the executives of the exploration company?”
“No,” Shade answered, annoyed at having her paperwork interrupted. “They rolled up a number of the peons, but the ones behind it all took their money and disappeared.”
Katze had been reading too. “Imagine coming all this way, with no way to get home. A hundred thousand people stuck in a ship above this crapsack world because of a con, those poor suckers.”
“Maybe the first ones that died off, before they found CX.” Bushey snorted. “As for the rest, I’m crying big old tears for them and the gold mine they got down there. I don’t care if it does come with a few kaiju.”
“I think that’s Warlord’s take on it too,” the captain said. “Maybe you and he will get along after all.”
* * *
A couple hours later they began their approach toward the port of entry into Swindle’s sovereign space. The port was simply a spinning habitat ring with an array of cannons that moved in an orbit that kept it in a fixed position relative to Big Town.
The port control radioed the captain, who identified himself. They sent out a gremlin to verify they were just a little striker. They got a cursory scan, and that was it. It was nothing like the layers of complex security around Nivaas. Big Town simply didn’t have those kind of resources.
Not much later, the captain turned the ship a hundred and eighty degrees and began to decelerate. The force shoved Jackson into the back of his seat. Big Town’s “navy” consisted of a few civilian ships they’d welded railguns onto, but they’d still smoke anything that came toward the orbital too fast.
Katze pointed at a conglomeration of objects orbiting Swindle. “Is that it?”
“That’s Big Town and its outlying facilities,” the captain answered. “In all of its hideous, crowded awfulness. Since I’ve been here, I guess I can play tour guide.”
The central part of Warlord’s domain was the shape of a closed-off tube, almost a kilometer in diameter and over eleven kilometers long, rotating to provide the close to two hundred thousand inhabitants something akin to gravity. That part had been the original colony ship, but Jackson only knew that from reading the guidebook. It was impossible to recognize as having once been a ship now.
“When the colonists couldn’t go down, and most of them couldn’t afford to return to Earth, or didn’t have anything to go back to, they turned their bus into a space station. They started adding modules onto it and have never really stopped.”
“It sure doesn’t look planned,” said Tui.
“Only if the architect was a crazy cat lady with hoarding issues. I don’t think the builders were big on zoning regulations.”
Big Town was ugly from the outside. There were huge solar arrays, and radiators, and various other appendages sticking out of it. Some were straight, some crooked, some short, some long. It looked like a crazy tentacle monster. On this end of the orbital, a long, stationary port arm stuck out, extending for about a half a klick. With all its branches, it looked like it could accommodate several transports at a time. On the far end the inhabitants had attached a huge asteroid that was in the shape of a human ear, the lobe sticking out into space.
“The mountain there is full of ice. They recycle their water supply, of course, but they always need more to send down with the harvesters who brave the surface, and they lose even more during the CX processing. When this one’s mined out, they’ll tow over a new one from their belt. You see that big lump there?” The captain highlighted a section on their display. “That’s the CX processing plant they built for their gold rush. Lots of security there.”
And indeed, that lump bristled with bots. Warlord’s sad little fleet was mostly positioned to protect it, because that was their moneymaker.
“And the large asteroid trailing Big Town?” Katze’s military service had been spent performing boarding actions, so of course she was the one to notice such things. “Gun platform, I assume?”
“Cheap, but effective. He’s got a number of them covering the place. The other two long orbitals in visual range are their farms. Warlord took me to one once. Think big greenhouses with high levels of carbon dioxide to help the plants grow. They’re actually kind of amazing. There’s one other big station in orbit, built out of one of the smaller colony ships, but it’s always on the opposite side of the planet. It’s run by some guy named Riku Kalteri, and they claim to be their own country.”
“They rivals?” asked Tui.
“Oh yeah. He hates Warlord, and Warlord hates him. They would have blasted each other out of the sky a long time ago, but that would force the ISF to step in, and neither of these little tinpot dictators want that to happen. I don’t supply him, and I don’t rightly know who does, but I’m sure he’s got a similar arrangement going. Kalteri has his piece of Swindle. And there are a half-a-dozen corporations jockeying to get pieces as well.”
“A lot of complications,” Katze said mused.
“It’s a powder keg,” the captain said.
“It’s money,” Shade said. “Lots and lots of money.”
Big Town control sent the captain his docking destination. They flew past three cleaning ships, collecting garbage. They flew past gremlins. They flew past a dropship on its way to the surface, probably carrying a crew of harvesters. And then they were approaching their designated bay. They moved in gently. Their approach was textbook. Once they were close, mechanical arms reached out, attached, and dragged them the rest of the way. A moment later there was a thump as they locked on.
“See, Jackson? I’ve still got it.” Then the captain turned his chair around. “Okay, team. Game time.”
They all unbuckled from their seats. The light above the port door turned to green, indicating it was clear to open.
“Please wait,” Control said over the open channel.
They waited.
“You may now disembark.”
Tui flipped open a cover and swung the lever to release the door. There was a brief whoosh and whistle as air flowed in from the corridor, indicating the port had a bit more air pressure than the striker. There were two security guards waiting there with carbines slung. One was male, one female. They wore dark blue body armor with snappy orange accents. On their heads were black helmets with faceplates and heads-up display. They were accompanied by a couple of hovering bots with menacing ports, which were probably also guns.
“You will need to leave all weapons on your ship. We’re here to make sure you comply,” the female guard said. “Welcome to Big Town.”