Sufficiently vast quantities, distances, and durations beggared human understanding. Alaya lay on a filthy mattress, a fab-slab that should have been recycled before it was put into use. Her Loop Charter Implant projected her current credit debt as a rainbow animated number. The digits far to the right ticked by so fast the implant just turned them into rivers or cartoon animal traffic. They were nothing but placeholders for the numbers further to the left. As she moved across the nine-teen digit long number, Alaya laughed aloud.
A culture on Earth ancient even before humanity reached into the stars had an especially sophisticated numeral system for a six-thousand year old ancient society. They were called the Chinese and despite their relative sophistication they didn’t bother to number more than ten thousand in their very early history. Ten thousand was just “a lot.” More than was worth counting.
The number Alaya stared at wasn’t worth counting.
It started with a three on the left and ended with a meaningless blur on the right. One of her spare procs looked it up while she was navel gazing. She owed more money than there were living human souls currently spinning around the sun. If she could afford one cycle’s interest payment on her debt, she’d be one of the .05% wealthiest people in all of the Loops, everywhere for that cycle and broke the next.
“Please tell me you’re not staring at that number again.” The voice still sounded like the engineer who’d rescued them from the converted boarding missile the two had stolen all those years ago.
“When are you going to pick a new voice or a new face?” Gaz didn’t give a response to her question and Alaya bit her lip. Touchy didn’t quite describe the cyborg’s feelings about her face and voice. But Alaya should have known better. “Fuck Gaz, I’m sorry. Rot me if I take my angst out on you, right?”
Nothing wrong with her dirty blond hair and green eyes. As far as Alaya was concerned, Gaz was beautiful. But she wanted Gaz to find her own face, her own voice. And something about them just rubbed Alaya the wrong way right after her dark thoughts of her debt.
“Do not worry about it. Nothing you’ve said has disturbed my tranquility.”
Hard to keep from grinning with Gaz around. “Your job still cherry?” Any chance to move on to better topics.
“In four more weeks at this rate, we should have enough to stock the Rhodian’s stores and pay our dock fees.”
A sense of tension Alaya had been clutching between her shoulder blades released. Her flagship was tied to her account, they’d had the scratch to pay their fees in cash but the dock AI ran her cred through instead and pinged against Alaya’s astronomical debt. As a result, they had to pay the fees, plus a penalty for not having the money on hand, plus interest from the dock, all of it multiplied by five because of her fucking debt. If not for it, Alaya would have put herself up in a coffin box for a few months and let Gaz work to her heart’s content. The cyborg didn’t like being idle and she flat refused to sleep. Alaya had promised to stop apologizing to Gaz over this snafu, so she bit her tongue.
“Good news. I’m off to the dock to earn a little myself and keep tabs on the ships.” Making money was an absurd proposition for Alaya with her debt garnishment in place. She only earned one credit for every five someone paid her. Of course the real purpose of setting up in the docks and earning there had nothing to do with money. The money was just a slight bump in their finances. Alaya hugged Gaz and patted her on the shoulder, ignoring the dark lurker between them and scurrying to the door before one of her four other roommates came in. “Take care, please be safe Gaz.”
The cyborg smiled and her green eyes glowed when Alaya spoke her name. “Thank you.”
Water ran from every surface of the station. Space, she’d read somewhere, was a desert. But a desert where the oases contained more bounty than all of Earth’s oceans, land and air. Which ever ancient poet penned those words, they’d been right.
Bahl-Mau Station IV hung in an artificial stable orbit near the axis of three Loops, Ryden’s Loop, Gilead Loop, and Aleph-null Loop. Gravitic effects had long ago drawn in enough water the station could practically give it away for free. Those effects had pulled in oxygen, hydrogen, and heavier elements the station used to trade. All of that had been siphoned away by traffic and the steady laws of commerce toward busier and more successful loops over the century. Now all Bahl-Mau Four had to offer was anonymity and water.
Out here in the black where smugglers and others of ill-repute gathered, those two were priceless. Alaya considered them so, though she didn’t like to think of herself as criminal. The truth was hard to escape. Especially as she rolled into the docks.
This place was kept dry on purpose. Portions of exposed steal in docking collars and other sensitive parts could and did rust. In an effort to minimize the problem, station attendants — employees of the local mafia — dried anyone who entered off. For a fee. In Alaya’s case, she worked for the same boss so they waved her through after getting most of the water off. It helped her feel a little better, but also set her to sweating almost immediately.
Water was scarce in some stations, or so Alaya heard. Maybe there even the mob lieutenants might be dirty. But here everyone bathed and everyone took advantage of the abundant water. The stink wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Most of the BO came from hard work or from void salts clamping to the station for the first time after years in the black. There was nothing like the stench of a crusty old solo prospector glued into his suit after ten years of void mining.
Once in the docks proper, Alaya kept her head down. Shields, in this case arcane, kept the air in the station and let ships pass through. It, along with the water, was the best thing about Bahl-Mau Four. From where she stood, Alaya could peek up and get a view of space. She set her spareprocs to record important data for her fake job and her real job here while her main mental track took in the view.
Somewhere between sixteen and eighteen years she’d spent with little more than a few centimeters of shielding or metal between her and space. And she’d rarely taken in such a view during her life, not until she arrived here.
Stars blazed and incomprehensibly massive gas clouds shifted light into a different band as it passed through. Out there was a different kind of ineffable quantity, an expanse so vast the human mind simple failed to fathom it as a whole.
Alaya tore her gaze away.
Nothing about this station really mattered. Fuck the view. Fuck the water. And fuck the debt this place held over Alaya’s head. She would stay here exactly as long as she needed to find one little motherfucking ant in a hill of them: Kowal Het Lym. The asshole who’d carried out her parents’ assassinations. A good lead brought her here after almost six years of actively searching. This was the closest Alaya had come to the pirates who’d murdered her mother and father.
“The fuck you doing loitering, rat?”
Alaya glared up at the speaker, forgetting herself for a moment. None of the locals would call her that, not knowing she worked for Nissa. Her eyes met a bronze-toothed, bare chested ship grunt lugging a duffel bag and holding a intra-ship rifle in hand. It was the largest caliber most stations permitted aboard. Generally speaking they wouldn’t pierce the hull if fired within, they’d bounce. Anything larger had to stay abroad ship and usually locked down.
“Sorry.”
“You can say more than that.”
He grabbed Alaya’s shoulder and his buddy, this one with the modesty to put a jacket on over his chest, grabbed his arm. “Leave off.”
“No this bitch needs to…”
Alaya had kept her posture curved in and non-assertive. But he’d sounded just like Kowal in the moment and her blood was already up. Mother’s wit and anger spoke through Alaya’s lips. “You carry that cause your dick stopped working?”
Damnit.
If Gaz had been here, picking a fight with a void drunk salt might have been more fun. At least he might have survived if Gaz had stopped him. But bad luck for him, he hit Alaya with the butt of his gun. Illegal cyberware in her skull absorbed the impact and initiated the damage-avoidance and healing process. Alaya had never been much of a fighter, so it took her a half second too long to raise her hands. If he’d only hit her once or if he hadn’t dropped her with the second blow, everything might not have gone wrong.
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The second strike hit Alaya across the temple with the heavy, square barrel of the man’s rifle. It snapped her head around, spun her, and landed Alaya on the metal dock floors with their fading numbers painted on them.
“Hold still aggressor!” It was a mechanical voice and if they’d ever been to the station before, the two men — the one who’d hit Alaya and his buddy — would have known to immediately freeze. Everyone in hearing range, including Alaya had frozen stiff. How could you be sure the voice wasn’t talking to you?
Mr rifle and Mr jacket apparently kept moving because the laser fire commenced. In holovids, lasers were efficient, neat little murder tools. Not so in real life. Neither man stood a chance as the guns cut them down. But they did not die cleanly. Blood, hot and near boiling spewed from the men’s wounds. There was no instant cauterization here but rather massive physical trauma including ruptured bones.
A few screams broke out nearby, likely people hit by blood or bone fragments. Alaya doubted they moved while the black and orange enforcement drone floated through the docks. Alaya couldn’t see it, but she didn’t need to in order to know what it was doing. Their paths were always the same, little deviation or imagination among enforcement drones.
“Resume activity. The threat has been neutralized.” Its suspensors made a burbling trill as the enforcement drone flew away. They never made any sound on approach, but made this little happy tune when they flew away. Some marketing asshole probably came up with that.
More screaming broke out, now mixed with shouting. Medical drones showed up, treated a few people and then flew off with an unconscious victim for triage. The dead men’s accounts would be assessed for the medical bills. But unfortunately for them, they would not find a certain station-safe rifle among their effects.
“You okay Mouse?” Alaya suppressed her twitch as best she could at the question.
“Hey Kirk.” She turned around with her best smile in place. She was instantly glad she did. A man wearing a subdued animated suit rushed through the docks in the distance over Kirk’s shoulder. “Bye Kirk!” She patted him on the back, spinning as she ran. Her implants filled her body with pain relievers so she could ignore the injuries on her face. All that mattered was tracking down Kowal; the man in the suit.
Alaya ran smack into a mound of muscles and cyberware. “Olin. Howdy.” She landed on her butt with her hands at her back. “What can I do for you?”
“Nissa wants to talk.” He grabbed her by the front of her overalls and pulled her to her feet.
“Great, great. Talking to Nissa, that sounds marvelous! Let’s go do that now.” Alaya let her feet dangle. She’d lost sight of Kowal, but there was nothing to do about that . At least she knew he was on the station. There was no way he recognized her. Not yet.
Olin didn’t have the slightest problem holding and dragging her. While she babbled, she sent a quick burst to Gaz: mrgnC nissa now. She couldn’t activate her Loop Implant properly here. It was one thing to employ the multitool functions of the implant. But if she used the comm-enhancements or anything “special” it would alert the other Loop Charter holders to exactly where she was at this moment. Alaya didn’t need to do that again. Ever if possible. No wonder mother and father had lived on an old derelict in a disused Loop.
They ended in an old fashioned and enormously expensive room: it was Nissa’s reception room. Wood paneling covered the walls, not printed plastic but real wood. Grown from trees on Ganymede or a lumber cylinder. Or magiced up by some wizard or theurge. Whatever the origins, it was a grand, ostentatious use of credit. Every piece of furniture, every fixture in the room was wood save the carpet and the two cloth wall hangings. The carpet was real wool and the tapestries were probably silk based on Alaya’s guess.
“Wait here.”Olin dropped her on a carpet with a grunt and took two deliberate steps away. Then he turned and folded his arms as if to say, “I am two steps away from you. There is no way you can escape me.” Alaya tended to agree.
Nowhere else to go, might as well sit down on the wood. Alaya didn’t see what was so great about wood. If anything, it was as stiff or stiffer than any piece of plastic. Maybe with a cushion it might have suited her better. The last time she’d visited Nissa she hadn’t had the chance to sit. “Visited. Haha.” This wasn’t a social call, though Nissa might pretend it was.
The door opened as if to underscore Alaya’s thoughts, two men carried a third battered and bloody man with a hard-shunt jammed into his cyberware. It was a nano-spike and a nasty piece of business, able to control or disable cyberware unless it was similar nano-craft or had countermeasures. Most did not. Alaya’s normal cyberware did not.
This was a message, Nissa had kept this guy in her office until Alaya arrived. Great. I would have preferred cheese or fruit.
“Okay you can go in now.” Olin’s voice was deep and almost laughing at Alaya. She’d probably shown her dread while thinking about it.
Bad habit that.
“Little miss Mouse.” Nissa wore a four-armed large busted combat cyborg today. It came as no surprise the sheer volume of busty, attractive female bodies companies produced who also included the capacity to eviscerate their targets. That particular chassis represented something special too: hard core cyborg piloting skills. Not many people could be inserted into a pseudo-human chassis like that and pilot it without a problem. Yet as Alaya walked in Nissa’s lower arms served tea, her upper right waved, and her upper left pulled out an old wooden go board. “Care for a game?”
That was not a real question. Alaya hated those kinds of questions, the kinds that were also orders. Hard to keep the scorn off her face. “Sure. Usual handicap?”
A tiny, gnat-sized frown creased the edges of Nissa’s lips. I am just bound to get murdered today, aren’t I? Gaz was right. I should stop looking at that fucking number. “Of course miss Mouse. Four stones?”
“Sure, wherever you want.” Rumor said Nissa brought everyone who tried to join her group in to play Go with her. The same rumors said you didn’t have to win for her to let you into her gang. Alaya didn’t know one way or the other because she’d beaten Nissa badly their first game. The intimidating underboss had insisted Alaya play her a second time, with handicap before she let Alaya go. That second game had been tense and more interesting than any single game Alaya had played with Gaz or Darby in years. If not for the tension, Alaya would have looked forward to playing Nissa.
All four stones down, Nissa nodded to Alaya to take her turn. Before Alaya managed to get her stone out of her bag, Nissa said, “it is rather hard to shake corpses for dock fees, Mouse.”
Alaya dropped the stone. Wind whistled through the room and her autonomic subsystems flooded Alaya’s body with adrenaline and other stress hormones. But Nissa had swiveled her body over the board, arched one hand on the table, grabbed a cup and saucer with two, and snatched the stone before it hit the ground. Shaking, Alaya took the stone and saucer. Tea, probably the most expensive thing in the room ounce for ounce, spilled over the edge of the cup as Alaya tried to counteract her perfectly reasonable panic response. “Thanks.” The word came out strained and high pitched. Well, she was waiting for Nissa to cut her in half. Though the underboss moved her lower body back in place, she kept her head a little closer to Alaya’s.
“And those void salts on the docks?”
“You have the vids. They ran into me and tried to pick a fight.”
“I did see them. I heard them too.” Nissa’s torso swung back into place and her head floated back. She tapped her lips with her index finger. “You incited that man to violence, don’t you think?”
“You heard him too, right? He was gonna…”
“If you’re not even going to try, it’s boring.” Nissa sighed and placed a stone in response to Alaya’s move. “I’ll stop caring about the corpses on my dock if you can give me something valuable to consider instead.”
And there was Nissa’s real demand. It had taken Alaya a while to understand how the underboss liked to conduct her business. Aside from Go and vague threats anyway. Nothing about Nissa was direct.
Fortunately, Alaya had already planned for this. “There’s a short liner in bay 17. It looks shelved and pitted, but I got a good look in the center of those pits. It’s a cam-job. Their bags and cargo are off too. I bet you my entire debt they’re vacationers trying out the “rogue” life.” A co-processor rattled off the information and Lex repeated it verbatim. She’d added her own little flare to those coprocs.
“Very nice catch little mouse. Very nice indeed. And no, I will not be taking that bet.”
Alaya laughed. Nissa probably thought she was talking about her dock fees and penalties, which were increasing at their own prodigious little rate. Compared to her real debt, the fee was actually laughable. “Girl can’t help but try. Are we good, Nissa?”
The underboss took a deep breath and nodded. “You seem to be under a misapprehension miss mouse.”
They both placed their stones in quick succession. “How’s that?”
“You seem to think I might kill and torture you any moment.” Alaya looked up and paused in dropping her stone.
“And?”
“And nothing. You are only partially correct. I find myself somewhat fond of you. I’ll make it quick. If you cross me, you won’t even know it’s coming. Consider it a gift for your loyalty and honesty.”
“Thanks?” Alaya’s heart was thumping in her chest.
Nissa pointed toward Alaya with her black stone. “I’m trying to get you to relax. I’m saying if I call on Olin and bring into you my parlor. I am not going to murder you. Right then.”
The words finally broke through to Alaya’s consciousness. “Oh, you’re saying I’m safe here.”
“As safe as you can be. Assuming I have your loyalty.”
“Oh, that’s awesome.” Alaya grinned at Nissa and placed her own stone. It effectively cleared the board of black stones and ended the game.
Nissa opened and shut her mouth a few times. Then she nodded at Alaya with a smile. “Nicely done. I guess our game is over. You are dismissed.”
Alaya stood and bowed to Nissa. “Thank you again.”
“Oh one more question.”
She was going to be sick if her body kept dumping panic drugs on her. “Yeah?”
“Why were you following one of Mal-ware’s men out of the dock during your shift?”