“The man… I was following?” Alaya raised her voice to ensure the question was clear. She needed time to think. Lying to Nissa… was off the table. Maybe on Alaya’s own flagship, deep in the void, she could have tried to deceive the underboss. But sitting there sipping from the fine china tea set Nissa had given her. No, Alaya wasn’t stupid. A whole station segment’s worth of biometry currently turned its sensors on her for all she knew.
“He registered as…” Alaya used her own cyberware controls to lock her neck, spine and hips in place. Otherwise she would have leaned forward like a dog. The smirk which crossed Nissa’s face did its job: confirmed for Alaya there would be no deceiving Nissa today. “Oh, are you interested?” The smirk didn’t leave her face as she quirked an eyebrow up.
“He’s a connection to an old acquaintance. One I’d really like to meet again.” Talking casually about the people who’d ruined her childhood and murdered her parents came a lot harder to Alaya than she would have professed.
“You’ve not even seen two decades of life little mouse. How could you have formed such a deep hatred…” whatever else Nissa had intended to say died on her lips as she stopped to listen to something which interrupted her chain of thoughts entirely. She turned to Alaya. “Did you arrange for my sanctuary to be attacked while you were distracting me?”
“What? No!” Fuck that. I would never do that. Alaya locked down her own brain, as much as her cyberware would let her, knowing if she thought about it, there were unpleasant possibilities she might have to consider to explain that question.
Nissa stared at her, clearly reviewing those biometrics. She then nodded and said, “good. I was not mistaken about your loyalty then. You should leave with Olin and return to your shift. We’ve had a breach which is a matter you should share with no one.” The threat in Nissa’s tone and bearing could not have been clearer, even without her lower limbs making claw motions in time with her speech.
Alaya was up and at the door in moments. She turned and bowed to Nissa, who waved her off with a perfunctory dismissal. Olin waited angrily at the door, turning the full power of his rage-filled glower on her. “If I find out you had something to do with this…” Like Nissa, Olin didn’t have to elaborate. Alaya was pretty sure he’d tear her apart and space the remains just out of boredom. Doing something to harm Nissa would only incentivise him to get creative.
The shiver rolled through her now freed muscles involuntarily as Alaya scurried away from Nissa’s compound. The docks weren’t far away and Alaya had every reason to go right there without dillydallying.
Things at the docks had returned to their usual patterns. Though these old Loops weren’t as wealth-filled as their heyday, there were still places an ambitious prospector could turn a profit. The right find under the right legal protections might turn a pauper into landed gentry. Alaya’s youth had been filled with such rocks to red meat tales. But her fucking implant barred Alaya from such a life forever. Not unless she played the black and lived there. Getting used to people like Nissa and Olin was her only choice.
Except for Janice…
Janice’s offer sounded more attractive now than it had two years ago. Especially with the fucking dock debt looming over her head. The wealthy socialite could have wiped out the dock fees and paid Lex enough to make her next few years easy, even with the eighty-percent loss from the garnishment. But Alaya had a job to do, something which superseded anything Janice might ask.
Nissa on the other hand hadn’t exactly given her blessing to Alaya’s hunt for Kowal. But neither did she order Alaya to leave him alone. Would Alaya retain her freedom working in the shadows for someone like Janice? Chains of velvet or shadow. Which wore more comfortably and which one gave her the most leash?
Turning on her heel and shoving her own mental cycle aside, Alaya headed for the dock offices only to have Kirk intercept her. It was as if he’d been watching the whole time.
“Hey ‘Laya.” He said it “lay-uh” instead of “lie-uh,” the way her parents had pronounced her name. Anyone else but Kirk, and Alaya would have grumpily corrected them. But Kirk was basically the dock mascot. His presence on the crew had been a mercy from Nissa and a good indication of how she treated her staff.
Nothing was obviously wrong with him until his own neural implants kicked in to stop the seizures or strokes. One of the other dock drudges had told Alaya not to give Kirk anything heavy or delicate in case the implants went off. They kept him alive and kept his brain from starving itself, but for a few seconds, his hands and legs might seize up. On a wealthier station, he would have either received an proper implant or gene therapy to permanently fix the problem. Here he dealt with it.
“Hey Kirk.”
“Glad you didn’t die ‘Laya!” Kirk clapped her on the back and nudged her shoulder with his own.
It was cure the way he clearly had a crush on her. Kirk was maybe five years older than Alaya, but she thought that was a stretch. Like her, his birthday on his records said
Was it safe to think about Gaz here? Deep in her subconscious, Alaya pondered the question. It wasn’t beyond reason to fear Nissa retained mind readers and other faculties to probe surface thoughts. No. It’s really not safe. In Nissa’s position, if she doubted an underling’s loyalty. She would pull her in, frighten the crap out of he and then reassure her she knew she was one of the good ones. Then, once her suspect had relaxed and dropped her guard, Alaya would have swept in and found what she’d been looking for from the beginning. It wasn’t Gaz, but no need to bring h… them into this. Ugh.
The two of them reached the dock offices and Kirk opened the door for Alaya with a little bow. Again, cute. Inside, Trindle Grun the dock manager, looked up and frowned when he saw Alaya and Kirk walk in. “Nissa didn’t finish you off. Lost 30k credits on that.”
Alaya snorted. “She told me to keep my eye on you, Grunner. Make sure you weren’t taking a few shavings of the grift here and there.”
He screwed his face into one of true anger, mouth puckering and lights along the edges of his face blinking in faster sequence. Before he blew a capacitor, he said, “come and look at my ledger then why don’t you. I’ve never reported anything but the…” Kirk’s laughter slowed Grun’s defensive protestations and eventually brought them to a halt. “You’re messing with me?”
“You make it so easy, Grunner.”
The old man’s face turned red. “Fine, you can go clean landing gear, after that the latrines.”
“Took care of the lats already Grun.” Kirk didn’t show as much defiance as Alaya. “And Pete’s on the LG making ‘em shine.”
Grun sighed and looked between the two of them. “Then put on the suit and go manage loads.” He shouted at the two of them as they ran out the door. “And don’t break our loader!”
“Did you arrange all of that?” Alaya waited until they’d come to the heavy equipment closet before she asked. “With the latrines and Pete?”
Kirk looked down and to the left, away from Alaya. “I don’t mind cleaning the latrines and Pete likes the aloneness…”
“Solitude.” Alaya supplied.
“Yeah, solitude of cleaning. And if he can’t send you to the lats or to the LGs…” Kirk’s eyes widened and he stared back at Alaya as if afraid of letting her see him looking.
“Then I’ll have to come help you.”
Kirk clapped. “And I get to pilot the loader and you get to supervise me.”
“Everybody wins.” Alaya couldn’t help but grin at him. Humble, smarter than people thought, and kind. They were good combinations.
Kirk all but giggled as he entered the sequence to activate the loader and ready it for a pilot. Given the excitement, Alaya had been watching Kirk closely. When he seized up, she was ready. It wasn’t a sure thing, but overstimulation — like having an angry void merchant yelling at you — could provoke an episode. So could excitement. She hadn’t known him long, but Alaya had gotten good at getting close to people. The look Kirk flashed her as he opened his eyes in her arms suggested she might have gotten too close to him. “Thanks ‘Laya.”
She didn’t drop him then, but it was a near thing. She propped him up and helped Kirk stand with his arm against the wall. The implants had already corrected the problem. But the episodes seem to have gotten more frequent. “No prob…”
He scampered off toward the loader, utterly unconcerned with his episode. The loader was one of the safest places for anyone on the station — it had shielding — magical and ballistic — a reinforced cockpit, and an independent life support system. But for Kirk, it had the advantage of an onboard AI which would take over if he went unresponsive. He could run the thing to his heart’s content, it would keep him safe, and keep him from hurting anyone if his implants activated. The only reason Alaya was here was that anyone operating the loader needed a spotter and someone to help load and unload the loose items.
Alaya didn’t care one whit about her jobs in the dock, other than this was the one which brought her into contact with travelers. Cleaning bathrooms and landing gear would not do that. No reason to tell Kirk that right now. Let him have his fun.
As a pilot, Kirk was talented. If someone trained him, he could probably be a skilled borg operator as well as an equipment jockey. Strange to think such a valuable person with a useful set of skills was out here wasting his time doing nothing good on Bahl-Mau IV. “You ever tinker with this stuff, Kirk?”
“Oh no no, Grun would get real mad if I did that. Nope. Just drive it, don’t mess with the bits.”
People who could pilot with the ease Kirk did could usually tinker their way around anything. Alaya’s father had been like that, so had several people Alaya knew. For her, both piloting and mechanics had been hard, something to hone, not something to hop into with wild abandon and just… pick up. But Kirk did it. Had done it. Whatever. According to dock rumors, he’d bumble-fucked his way through the manual and ended up walking the thing across the yard by himself the first time he tried.
Four meters tall and filled with the kinds of actuators and reinforcement that might have given Gaz some trouble if she’d had to tangle with one, the loader filled a defensive and utility role. It warned newcomers the mafia here had enough cred and weapons to be a threat. Most travelers wouldn’t know about its lack of speed and the fact most models had force inhibitors on them. In this one, the AI filled that role.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Kirk moved the loader with art and grace befitting a professional. People could get antsy with a three-ton shipping crate flying overhead. His gentle palaver and reassurances kept people from shuffling away from him too quick.
Alaya set two coprocessors to watching Kirk in case anything did go wrong and thought back to her father’s lessons. Maybe she wore rose-tinted glasses, but he’d been so gifted and yet had done such a good job teaching and leading Alaya to find her way around similar machines. She’d never gotten to play with an actual loader in her youth. But her father had made sure to give her access to the simulations. Those lessons had saved her life more than once.
A coprocessor sent up an alert and pulled the full attention of Alaya’s consciousness to the present. Events were already in motion as Alaya reacted. Kirk’s voice droned over the communication unit from within the loader. He’d suffered something serious for his implant to leave his speech centers open. What should have happened was the loader should have just kept moving, albeit with considerably less efficiency or grace.
Instead the whole thing twitched, the loader arm closest to Alaya screeched with the grinding of metal against metal and shot the cover off across the room and out the air shield. Her coprocessor screamed at her it was important, but she had other, more important things.
Alaya shouted the warning as the loader and its cargo, a high-ton light two person craft, toppled over. Into a crowd of people.
— — —
Perched among metal girders as she was, Gaz had been dripping, soaking wet for hours. The station goons had returned to their section empty-handed. Though no doubt some hapless residents of the section suffered at the hands of the enforcers indirectly because of Gaz. It still bothered her. And it bothered her that it bothered her. Knowing a feedback loop was coming, Gaz shunted those thoughts, along with all complaints about her sopping wetness, and focused on Alaya. Specifically on her future
Though the young woman had forbidden it, Gaz had been working herself up to tossing a few small credit bets on Loop stocks. She had over three hundred years of detailed projection information collated by the pirates at her disposal as well as her highly illegal cerebral modifications. Gaz would make a bloodless killing on the market. And she wanted that for Alaya. Badly.
Then again, if she lost…
An alert went out on the station security channel about an accident at the docks. Though no fool, Gaz abandoned protocol and flapped from her roost at once. It wasn’t beyond belief for Nissa to fake an emergency to draw out her quarry. But Alaya’s safety made the perfect bait.
No one tried to intercept Gaz when a short woman with an athletic build, curly red hair, and blue eyes stepped into the corridors from the access shaft wearing a common drudge’s tunic and pants. Most of the crowd moved away from the docks. Not Gaz, she charged toward them.
Enforcers watched every foot entrance to the docks as well as a few of the better-known slip entrances. But Gaz worked station security, she knew slips no mere drudge would know. The second one she checked had no one guarding it. The tunnel wouldn’t take her directly to the docks, but with a few connections it would get her to the dock service access tunnels. Close enough. Those were intended for humans and drones, so she shouldn’t have too much trouble down there.
Aside from a nest of rats she’d disturbed, Gaz arrived at the junction unmolested. But all of the exits were closely guarded, which had been her concern. Still, it was a small matter for Gaz to send a probe from this distance and use its senses to find out what was happening.
The prob slipped through a gap in the service door. Someone needed to fix that in case of a air-lock failure. How this passed inspection escaped Gaz. Initial scans from within the dock showed the typical ships landed on their rectangular platforms. She ignored those and focused on the activity near Dock 2.
A loader lay on its side with a small voidcraft lying next to it. Both machines were essentially trashed. Good mechanics could salvage them, but only with replacement parts. Alaya sat near the top of the fallen loader. The sight of her made Gaz’s endochrine level spike. But the scanner showed Alaya’s condition as green.
No one was in either the loader or ship cockpits, but based on the cutting patterns around the loader, someone had been.
Grun, the large bitter dock manager shouted at Alaya, “he’s still out, but you can see him now.”
“He” most likely referred to Kirk or one of the other dock drudges. Alaya made friends quickly and one of them — Kirk — had grown close with her. Gaz didn’t see him.
Guiltily, Gaz wanted the young man to have been killed or at least permanently injured to ensure she would have no competition for Alaya’s attention. Juvenile and offensive to her own sensibilities, Gaz chided herself for her thoughts.
Low power, non-magical probes had limited ranges. Gaz’s couldn’t follow Alaya to the manager’s office, so Gaz repositioned herself through the tunnels. To her surprise, she almost stumbled into another person lurking in the service tunnels.
They wore a thick tunic with a hood pulled up over their heads. Gaz still caught a look at their pale white skin and angular facial tattoos and scars. It wasn’t a pattern she recognized and the clothing was notable for how warm most stations grew. Rockbound thought space was cold, and sure if you tumbled out without a suit or found yourself powered down and drifting, you’d probably freeze to death.
But ship and station were limited in size not by their energy demands or by the subtle fingers of gravity, but by good old entropy. Space didn’t want the heat ships and stations generated. Radiating was hard in the black, so most had to get creative. In old days, when space travel had just started, power was an issue so freezing was a serious risk. But these days heat budget was a limiter, not power. Most stations ran hot, just like Bahl-Mau IV.
This guy was bundled against an arctic winter under his tunic and hood. Whatever he was wearing blocked out Gaz’s scans. That realization didn’t save her life as much as her pride. He’d passed her and she’d turned toward him when she discovered her instruments couldn’t penetrate his clothing.
The hooded man held what could only be a type of wand on her. It resembled a hand-sized turn crank. Almost tear-drop shaped with a cylinder at the tip, pointed toward Gaz. Several little disks with arcane runes on their fronts oriented themselves toward Gaz from the fore of the wand. He jumped when she turned on him, he’d probably been about to cast on her without warning. “It’s not your lucky day, pal.” He spoke with an Arcadi accent, one of the Loop gangs who claimed nearby territory. “But can’t let anyone see me here.”
He should have just pulled the trigger. Gaz skipped to the right, into a tunnel fork and out of the blue line of his spell. It disintegrated a 3mx3m section of wall. That was definitely not the kind of weapon the station would permit normally.
The wizard cursed at Gaz as he grabbed his wand-caster. No time to let him do whatever he intended, she spun out of her side tunnel using radar to track him and aimed for his head. She’d leave him alive, but would definitely give him a headache as a message to reconsider his life choices.
But then a soft yellow ray shot up into Gaz’s face. She’d couldn’t have taken the magical effect more directly if she’d been posed and waiting for it.
Sensors and probes stopped responding as the cyberware and flesh in Gaz’s body decided it needed a time out. Such magic wasn’t entirely effective against a cyborg like Gaz, but it definitely limited her options. A single drone floated out of her shoulder and the hooded mage squeaked at her. He bashed it out of the air and sprinted away.
If he’d stayed and used another disintegration spell on Gaz, he would have eliminated her. Even if it had taken more than one. Her little drone didn’t follow the wizard. It’s job had been to stop him from using his wand again first and foremost. A new second, it was supposed to free Gaz from this effect. She needed a reboot to end it quickly, before someone came to investigate the alarms disintegrating a 27-cubic foot block of space station set in motion.
Gaz knew exactly where her own cyberbrain was. So she could direct her drone with utter precision. The needle it extruded hit the exact spot necessary to spike her power.
11.23 seconds. A full system reboot was the longest way to bring her whole brain down and back up. It was also an excellent way to dump a persistent magical effect from her cyberware. No longer digitally paralyzed, Gaz’s multi-processor functions took up the slack from her still affected brain matter. With time, the effect would pass. But for now, Gaz treated her body a little like a standard human operator would: go here legs, turn there head, run from the incoming security teams, that sort of thing.
Gaz rode her own body back out of the service tunnels and into the main concourse again. Once more she transformed. This time into an older matron, with a soiled and ripped tunic and grey hair. Age would have looked out of place on a wealthier station, but here on Bahl-Mau rejuvenation treatments were reserved for the made gangsters and wealthy. Not for poor old moms like the one Gaz pretended to be.
Security teams tore into the concourse, people she worked with normally. Today was a rough day to call in, but it was also the first time. No one could really complain at her. Unless they found out she was the person — or one of the people — making unauthorized visits to the service tunnels during an emergency. That would be a conversation Gaz would have had to fight her way through. Unpleasant.
She went about her business as the legend she’d assumed, staying off the radar and even submitting to a security scan. The sec people didn’t even ask her a question as they ran their reader down her. It continued to amaze her how advanced her body proved to be. Alaya’s implant possessed the same relative level of technical ability. Common security scanners, even above average or quality ones wouldn’t register her as anything but organic with minor augments. Same with Alaya, who actually had minor augments.
Now if they’d taken her in and subjected her to a proper scan… another situation where she’d have to fight her way out.
And then they were gone. The tunnels were clear of security personnel and the normal residents of the station filled in the concourse with their activities, now filled with speculation about the accident and the security situation. A good many of the commenters decided the whole affair was just a drill, an excuse to shake down one of the petty gangs which controlled the borders of the larger gangs’ territory. As theories went, it was a good one considering the information the people had.
Before long they’d learn the docks really had an accident. That was when the information sphere grew interesting. Here was a place where Gaz was naturally drawn. At rumor stage two, when an official story came out, information increased in the system. But the narrative didn’t always change. No matter how well documented the accident, some people would doubt it happened.
Gaz knew herself how easy it was to fake information, especially digital information. And eye witness reports could be faked with magic, neural conditioning, or a dozen other more exotic options. The mere fact those things existed poked holes in the narrative’s reliability.
Some would accept what they were told. Perhaps they had a personal connection to the event like Gaz. Or maybe they just didn’t care for idle speculation. Whatever it was, at rumor stage two narratives would fork.
“Gaz? You there?” Alaya interrupted Gaz’s little personal thesis construction.
“I am and I am profoundly glad to hear from you.”
Alaya chuckled over the line. It was breathy, but sincere. Gaz recorded it and added the sound to her library. “Good to hear from you too. Wanna meet up later?”
“Yes. Definitely.” They had matters to discuss better handled in personal, or even over a hardline. No way to tap that without really sophisticated tricks. The kind which were inescapable. Best thing to do in that case was accept one’s fate.
“Usual place then.”
Alaya broke the connection and Gaz’s sensors hummed. The final vestiges of paralysis faded from her and she settled fully back into her body. Alaya was safe. Nothing mattered more. The fact Gaz had to spend so much time apart from Alaya was the greatest source of stress in the cyborg’s life. That and a certain secret she kept in a segregated cluster in her personal memory banks. Put a lid on that. It was harder to purge such memories from flesh than from chrome.
Normally the two didn’t worry about being seen together. Gaz usually met Alaya for work. But that just meant they were friends, acquaintances. Hardline connecting and discussing the kinds of things they were actually doing aboard the station was best left to dark and secluded places.
That was the justification Alaya gave out loud. But Gaz had known her long enough to know Alaya sought out dark and secluded places because they were where she felt most comfortable, safest.
Every station had spots like that. Humans needed more room than the numbers suggested, more than the 360 square meters usually allotted. Storage, maintenance, recreation, over and over new uses for berth aboard ship cropped up. And the more energy available, the easier it was to give over space. And the more heat the station needed to vent.
The section Alaya picked out was a mess of girders and reinforcement. Most of it, the vast majority, was redundant. Intended to be used to replace other structural elements in an emergency, this portion of the station had been littered with metal parts. As if she’d grown up among this very maze of steel and aluminum, Alaya led Gaz through the gaps and breaks in the old metal towers to a little spot completely out of view.
A long time ago someone had draped vat grown, musty cloth through this place and created a little den. They were long gone, based on the age of the cloth and the state of disuse of the den. But Gaz imagined it would have felt cozy once upon a time.