Valhalla had changed. Subtly at first, but now the difference was obvious. Everywhere Harry went he saw conflict. Petty squabbles became violent. He had to put himself between two food vendors who were in two warring labor factions. Drunken disorderly incidents had increased seventeen percent, and the drunk tank at the precinct was overcrowded. They were bringing them in faster than they could process them, charge them a fine, and get them out. A kind of lawlessness descended over the station.

Outside one of the gambling parlors, a couple of enforcers stopped a young woman who had been caught stealing food from being forcibly evicted via an airlock. All Cerberus personnel were ordered to gear up and only travel in pairs. Harry watched his fellow boys in black patrolling in matte black riot armor, stun truncheons at the ready, their nerves stretched taut like monofilament wire. Everyone blamed everyone else for Honey’s murder, while a few took advantage of it, profited from it, or used it to back up their own misguided politics. This was what collective mourning looked like. This was what decades of pain without release looked like. Valhalla station was one big enormous pressure cooker. Only when things finally came to a boil, there was nowhere for all that pent up energy to go.

Harry walked the corridors of the station, his head down and one hand over his needle pistol. In fifteen years he had never had to use it and only had to draw it a few times. But he was starting to think that streak was almost over.

Maddox, for his part, kept his own counsel. If he thought anything at all about what was going on he didn’t express it. He was good with detail work, computer research, running down leads, while Harry did the direct stuff, interviewing people and breaking up fights. The trouble Harry had extricated his partner from a few weeks back still nagged at him, but they had more important concerns at the moment, like bringing Honey’s killer to justice before the entire space station descended into anarchy. Or worse.

Harry’s slate chimed, and he pulled it from his pocket. It was Maddox.

“Steen’s K Club alibi checks out,” he said, sounding disappointed. “Any luck locating Bennett?”

“No. In spite of being a highly rated electrician he doesn’t keep a job very long, but he can’t afford to leave the station either. I’ve checked with his old employers and known associates, but everyone either doesn’t know where he is or they’re too afraid of him to tell me.”

The image of Maddox nodded in agreement. “I can’t ping his slate either, which means he’s using a burner. Dammit. You’d think these people would be easier to find. It’s not like we’re planetside.”

“Yeah,” said Harry. On Valhalla everyone but the immortals worked. If not, you were sent out on the next transport at your own expense. It took the effort of everyone aboard to keep the station functioning. Bennett was a special case. There was enough of a demand for his services that, even when fired, he could quickly slide into something else. There were dozens of contractors and subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, so he could stay ahead of the immigration squad. Anyone who managed to lose their job and become homeless would soon find their way out an airlock. Sure, alarms went off when that happened, but by the time anyone got there the perpetrators would be long gone, and the poor bastard who got spaced would be dead. Homelessness was not tolerated on Valhalla. There simply wasn’t room.

He found a lead into the Whisper Guild network easily enough. He went to talk to the spray paint kid in holding. For the promise of a reduced fine he told Harry that someone paid him twenty credits to spray the W, even threw in the can of paint for free. They made the transaction in a well-lit place near a security cam, so after that it was a quick process for the precinct’s facial recognition software to ID the guy as one Sal Guerra, a pipe fitter who had only been on Valhalla for six standard months before causing trouble rabble-rousing in the small park in the entertainment level known as Central Quad, making little stump speeches there about worker inequality until the enforcers ran him off.

Planetary governments had constitutions allowing for free speech, but Valhalla’s charter said that management can do whatever the hell they want thank you very much. It was an open secret that even what unions that existed on the station really worked for the immortals up spine. Too many people complaining was bad for PR. It was the one thing Harry hated about his job. The problem with being a private security force was that you were a part of a private security force. That meant enforcing the will of whomever was paying the bill and not necessarily the folks who actually needed protecting.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

But Harry’s job was to see to the safety and security of everyone on Valhalla, and this Whisper Guild stuff put everyone in danger. They couldn’t afford to have anyone cause trouble or damage essential systems that everyone relied on for their very survival. While he may agree with what some of them were saying in principle, he had a duty to stamp it down.

That’s how he found himself at a meeting of the Whisper Guild.

They met in a small gaming parlor that had been cleared out for that purpose, a dozen or so men and women wearing dirty coveralls and overworked expressions. Harry had removed his badge, kept his head low. They probably had him pegged for a bean counter, an accountant or maybe even a foreman from Bioengineering, but definitely one of the hoi polloi.

As it just so happened, their speaker that evening was none other than Rigel Bennett. Without introduction or preamble, he got right down to business.

“We gotta take a stand,” he said, standing atop a table used for tabletop wargaming. “We gotta do something so damn big the gods upstairs will notice us again. Who keeps their world running? We do. Who makes sure they have air and water, and food? We do. Who suffers so they can live like kings?

“We do!” came the answering volley from the room.

“Damn right! Which means we control it. All of it. We can shut off their water. Or their air. Make them listen to us.”

“What about what Honey said?” called a woman close by. The others piped in, asking the same question.

Rigel Bennett held up a finger to silence them. “Honey’s gone. It’s up to us now.”

More grumbles of decent. The speaker held up his finger again.

“Look. I loved Honey too. She was a patron of our cause. She was one of us. But she was also one of them.” He pointed at the ceiling just inches from his bald head. “In the end she only wanted to keep the peace. But we can’t make change by keeping the peace. We can’t get what we want by keeping the peace.”

The grumbles of dissent became cries of agreement. Harry could feel the energy in the room, like static electricity. He could almost smell ozone amid the odors of stale cannabis and sweat and cheap black market alcohol. He felt he was in the presence of something bigger than all of them. Harry imagined it was what being in church must have been like, back when there was such a thing. He had to suppress the urge to raise his fist skyward in solidarity.

Rigel Bennett twitched atop the table like an actor on stage, warming to his subject, responding to the crowd by flexing his long, slender fingers and working his jaw like he was trying to chew a particularly tough piece of vat-grown steak. If there had been room enough on the gaming table to pace, Harry surmised he might have done so, striding back and forth triumphantly. Instead he shivered in the cold light shining up at him from the illuminated tabletop and grinned at his captured audience. He waited for the raucous racket to die down before continuing.

“So here’s what we’re going to do. Each of us works in an essential area of the station. Each of us can control an important function. Environmental. Life support. Water filtration. Power. We’ll cut them off in Ring One a few at a time, until our friends up spine get the message.”

More cheers. Laughter.

Rigel Bennett leaped to the deck without so much as a closing statement, and little by little they filtered out of the little gaming parlor and went back to their otherwise humdrum, workaday lives, never once noticing Harry sitting in the far corner, his fingers steepled in thought. He supposed he was lucky to get this close. The Whisper Guild had mastered the art of subterfuge. They didn’t use the public nets to coordinate their activities, relying instead on a network of burner slates and notes scribbled on bits of recycled corn starch that could be dropped into the nearest recycler or eaten to cover their tracks. He knew he’d never get this close again. They’d never let him.

And while he might know their grand plan, Harry still didn’t know when or how or in what order they would carry it out. The gaming parlor didn’t have any cameras, so he had no way to ID the people who had been in attendance.

His slate chimed, almost startling him. It was his boss, Sergeant Gates.

“We’ve got a problem,” he said.

“No shit,” said his superior. She glared at him through the slate’s tiny screen, a hard-featured black woman with a grave expression on her face. “Your rookie partner has just been suspended pending an investigation.”

Harry recalled that day on the maintenance level. “On what charge?”

“Extortion. Racketeering. Maybe some other things once the IAD starts digging. Anything I should know?”

“What? About me? Hell no. Look, I barely even know the guy. I’m not gonna start a side business with him. I’ve been on this station for ten standard. You know me.”

Her face softened a little. “OK. But IAD is going to start digging around in your file too. Standard procedure. If there’s anything, I mean anything, you don’t want found, now’s the time to fess up. I can’t help you if I don’t know anything.”

“Honest, Sarge, I’m straight as an arrow,” said Harry. “And we’ve got trouble brewing down here in the worker levels.”

She arched an eyebrow. “How bad?”

“We’re gonna need everybody.”