Mudraker Territory, Office of the Overseer
Mercuria, Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.2.24 Interstellar
Janus found Lira and Mick waiting for him outside the Mudraker overseer’s office.
“How did it go?” Lira said, looking surprisingly calm.
“The void takes, but we’ll get our shipment. They’ll make a small profit but they won’t overcharge.”
Lira grunted. “Good job. I’m sorry, I almost blew it in there.”
“It’s fine,” Janus said, careful not to acknowledge the apology although he was touched by it. “Actually, I need your help.”
“Oh?” Lira asked.
“Not here,” Janus said. He looked at Mick. “Is there somewhere we can eat and have a private conversation?”
Mick nodded. “I’ll take you there. I need to get back to the crawlers by dawn, though.”
“Plenty of time,” Janus said.
Lira looked at him curiously, but she kept her thoughts to herself while they followed Mick through the crowds.
Still three-and-a-half hours until dawn and Janus felt the fatigue of the last day like an ache. They’d pulled it off and gotten a day ahead of the route schedule, but he was herky-jerky from the hard running and the Hunter stims. They should be making the easy trade and holing up somewhere safe for the day.
If the Mudrakers had been a standard gang, the kind that forced their people into membership and beat them if they tried to leave, that’s exactly what he’d be doing, but the meeting with Micah had thrown him off balance.
Mercuria was everything he’d expected, a pit with grinding jaws that devoured people and parts, but there were people like him, here, trying to make things better and failing. It made him homesick for all the wrong reasons. He wished he could talk to Callie about it. He even missed Ryler, the spy, because while the cultist had been spying on Janus and his family for as long as they’d known each other, Ryler had always been quick to help people with his knowledge or lend a hand.
He pulled up his VI and confirmed most of the details. The Electronaughts, Pit Vipers, and the Mudrakers were listed as the major political factions of the upper levels of Mercuria, with the Muds only slightly more dangerous than the others if provoked. The ’Naughts stayed neutral in most conflicts and had the best equipment. The Vipers controlled the gambling, prostitution, and drugs, while the Muds had the most bodies to throw at a problem but weren’t cohesive enough to do anything about it. It had apparently been this way for several hundred years; the names changed, but there was always a sort of polarization around tech, power, and people.
Not that different from Prime Dome, Janus thought, although he knew Lira would object.
What was different from Prime Dome was the availability of filtered air. There was no centralized medical database, but Janus had the VI scrape some of the obituaries on the noosphere, and the answer he found made him grit his teeth.
It was all wrong. Janus had expected to leave Prime Dome and find new places with different ways of thinking and doing things. That had been true in Crossroads. Maybe having Lira with him and having a personal connection to “Uncle Pasha” had shielded them from the bad part of Crossroads—he’d caught a glimpse of it, in the way the crowd had been eager to cheat him—but here, in Mercuria, he’d found the pain of his life in Prime Dome magnified.
It triggered an almost irrational hatred in him, not of the people but of the system. He wanted to crush it and scatter the dust in the void, and that scared him a little. He was struggling to keep that deep well of anger from spilling over.
Mick led them into a small restaurant, and the server nodded toward an empty booth. The walls were bare metal and the cushions were falling apart, but the booth seats had high backs that isolated them from the other customers.
“What’s up?” Mick asked, sitting down across from Janus and Lira.
“Can you broker the deals we make?” Janus asked, his tone hard and direct like he was speaking to a junior member of his shift. “I’d like our cargoes swapped out and ready for nightfall.”
Mick laughed. “Sure. Sounds like a lark. Trace is really going to flip when she finds out.”
“Does she not like Primers?” Lira asked.
“Nobody likes Primers except Primers,” Mick answered with a wry grin, and Lira scowled. “But it’s more about where she was born. She’s Trace Haven Mirandöttir.”
“She’s a Promethean,” Janus said, and he immediately regretted not having talked to the Hunter while he had the chance.
“Yeah,” Mick said. “And that’s the thing. Prometheus Base was one of the only domes to treat us Hunters like we belonged, even when we were just passing through. The veterans have names for it, like Haven or Hunterhome. It was where old Hunters retired, until it was gone. There are a lot of people in the caravans who feel like we carry a debt toward Prometheus Base that we can’t ever repay, but here I am, repaying part of it for her.”
Janus could see Lira didn’t like what she was hearing, but she was holding herself back and he had a system break. “Well, that’s good enough for me. I’ll transfer the contract to you.” Janus pulled up the smart contract that stipulated what the Muds would deliver and what he’d agreed to pay for it. He transferred it and the credits to Mick, with a provision that it would revert to him in four hours if not fulfilled and that only Micah’s people could unlock the transfer besides him.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“I’ll forward it to my people by the crawlers,” Mick said.
“Great,” Lira said, her voice edgy. “Glad we’re all such good friends. What did you need my help with?”
Janus may as well have been a plasteel wall. He was beyond tired. Any moment now, he expected to start seeing things out of the corner of his eyes, and they were putting a lot of trust in Mick that he wasn’t going to turn on them. Janus didn’t care. They needed his knowledge and strength, because this was outside Lira and Janus’s experience, a bad place that swallowed the weak and the naive. “I want to help the Mudrakers.”
“Help them how?” Mick asked.
“Forget how,” Lira said. “Help them, why?”
Janus leaned forward with his elbows on the table. “First of all, because we can. I would have sold them the entire cargo—”
“You can’t—” Lira started, but Janus held up a hand.
“I would have if they’d let me, but Micah says the higher quality filters would just get stolen or sold by their own people.”
“Yeah, that’s likely,” Mick said. “The ’Naughts don’t mind, but the Vipers don’t like the idea of Muds having it too good. It’s bad for their business.”
“You mean slavery and extortion,” Janus said.
“Don’t forget addictive pharmaceuticals,” Mick said cheerfully.
“I don’t see what we can do about that,” Lira said. “I’m not even sure we should. We’ve got fourteen to fifteen hours left in Mercuria and then we’re gone, Janus. What is it you’re hoping to accomplish?”
“I want kids and families to breathe clean air,” Janus said.
“So do I,” Lira said. “They should do something about it.”
“Ouch,” Mick said.
“Twelve years,” Janus said, turning to face Lira. “I asked my VI to scrape the public records. That’s how much younger you die if you live in Mudraker-controlled territory. They die because their lungs can’t get oxygen into their bloodstream, and infant mortality is almost three times as high.”
Lira glared at him. He knew she was tired. He knew she resented Mick being there and that she didn’t view the Muds as “her people” the way Janus did, but if she wasn’t lying about her hatred for him being specific to Prometheus Base, he had to believe she couldn’t turn her back on dying kids.
She sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Micah—I’m assuming that was the big brute in the office’s name—is right. If you give them something that’s worth selling, they will, because the short-term thinking is that credits buy you choices.”
“Don’t they?” Janus asked.
“No,” Lira said. “Credits are meaningless if you immediately have to spend them. You had the right idea. They need to reduce their costs to increase their recurring discretionary income. They need to invest that free cash flow until—never mind. We don’t have time for that. All we can do is give them an opening.”
“They’ll take it,” Janus said, and Lira looked at him skeptically. “Some won’t but others will. How do we do it?”
“Will the Muds take a handout?” Lira asked.
“No,” Mick said. “Micah won’t let them. That’s how the Vipers get people. The first taste is free.”
“Then we’ll work around him,” Lira said, some of the fatigue gone from her eyes. “We trade the Zenchan filters for a bulk order of cheap filters. If the Mudrakers are really getting the dregs, a small increase in price should result in a material increase in quality, and the resale value won’t be worth it.”
“How do we get Micah to accept?” Janus asked.
“We don’t,” Lira answered. “We spread the rumor of a special deal on Mudraker comm boards. By the time he finds out, his people will have the filters, and no leader in their right mind would try to take clean air from kids and families. His own people would riot.”
“The Vipers really won’t like it,” Mick said.
Lira shrugged. “That’s just one of the many advantages of not living here, Hunter. We can just leave.”
“You’re also assuming they’re going to have the credits on hand,” Mick pointed out.
“Good point,” Lira said, looking at Janus. “We need a broker, someone who’s going to keep the deal going after we’re gone.”
“Mick?” Janus asked.
The Hunter put his palms up. “Can’t. Hunters don’t get involved in settlement affairs. Our neutrality is part of why the gangs leave us alone.”
Lira scoffed, then said, “Normally, I’d say we could ask the Cult of the Survivor, but they’ll see it as interfering with the Trials, so we need someone else who doesn’t mind pissing all three of the gangs off.”
Mick laughed. “Shame we can’t get Old Frey involved. She’d do it because it pissed the gangs off. She doesn’t have much to lose at this point.”
Janus and Lira both looked at Mick.
The Hunter’s face dropped. “You can’t. Old Frey is the owner of the King’s Bluff Resort. I told you about her. You can’t even get to her without going through a gang checkpoint, and that’s not happening without a fight.”
Janus smiled evilly and looked at Lira. “See, that’s just one of the many advantages of not living here, Mick, We can just leave.”
***
They ordered food and drink from the restaurant while Mick made some calls. The Mudrakers had wasted no time on their delivery, and before Janus was halfway through his veerpat and nutrif stew, his comm chimed that the transaction was completed.
Mick also introduced them to a contact with the Electronaughts who had gladly taken their Zenchan filters and agreed to supply two pallets of inferior Hendricks-Altimer filters in return, with a sizable balance in credits. They did the business in the booth, with Mick watching. The ’Naught was curious as to what they planned to do with more filters than their buggy could carry—word about aspirants traveled fast—but there was enough of a culture of “discretion” that the gang engineer took Janus’s suggestion to shove his curiosity somewhere else gracefully.
Mick tried to call “Old Frey,” but he got a tongue-lashing for getting involved in someone else’s scam. When told it wasn’t a scam, the old lady had scoffed and said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Guess that’s permission to show up, then?” Janus asked.
“That’s what it sounds like to me,” Mick said with a grin, although Janus could tell he was worried. “You know, you don’t have to do this. We could just leave these filters where the Muds can find them.”
“Easy for you to say,” Lira said. “We paid for those.”
“You’re not going to get paid for them now,” Mick said. “Best case, you manage to come back after the Trials and Frey has something for you. Worst case, you never make it back, or when you do, Frey’s been killed and dropped into the pit. I’ll refund you your thousand credits if it makes the blow sting less.”
“It’s not about the money,” Janus said. “And two pallets of filters aren’t going to change all of Mercuria. It’s about the statement. The only thing keeping the Muds down is the belief they can’t stand.”
Mick clenched his jaw but said nothing.
Lira set her spoon down and pushed the empty bowl away. “For what it’s worth, even if this succeeds in changing the power structure, it will only start a new cycle. Either the Pit Vipers will find a way to stay in control, or the Muds’ leadership will be corrupted by their new reach and turn into predators themselves. You need laws and structure to keep people in check.”
Janus looked at her, his face a neutral mask. It was fine for her to say. In Prime Dome, the laws and structure had kept her people’s boot on his people’s neck, at least for a generation. “It’s still worth doing. Someone else can solve the next problem.”
Lira nodded. He wasn’t sure if he’d gotten through to her or she was just resigned to the fight.
Within two hours, everything was in place.