Mining Station Alpha-Twenty-One, Twenty Kilometers Below
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.20 Interstellar
Janus took a deep breath. The situation they’d been walking into—pirates taking the miners and supply ship crew hostage—had just become more complicated. There were no pirates. Instead, it seemed like the miners had taken at least part of the supply ship crew prisoner.
“Is there any way to find out what happened here?” Janus asked Syn.
Syn shrugged, her eyes glowing blue as she tapped the security feed. “All the past footage has been erased, and the cameras aren’t recording right now.”
Ivan shrugged. “Miners mutinied, took the supply ship crew prisoner, and now they’re covering their tracks.”
“That’s not the entire supply ship crew,” Syn said. “So either they’re dead and recycled, or rotting on the submarine, or at least part of the supply ship is working with the miners.”
“Could be a hostage situation,” Mick said. “Or, get this, it could be that the supply ship crew were pirates, and the miners just made a citizens’ arrest.”
“Why’d they erase the footage, then?” Syn asked.
“Inside job,” Mick said.
Janus signed. It was never easy. “Let’s focus on creating the best outcome we can based on what we know. First, we need to protect the prisoners in ore storage, but we can’t trust them not to turn on us.”
“As soon as you do that, either the prisoners or the guards will comm for help,” Ivan said.
“I can take down the network,” Syn said, “but they’ll notice that.”
“But they won’t know why it happened. That’s our best option.” Janus said. Part of him wished they’d kept the remora attached to the maintenance hatch and that they could just decide this was too complicated a situation, dump the cargo, and continue on their journey, but he knew he couldn’t do that. The people in this part of the undersea depended on the supply network, and he also couldn’t abandon the supply ship’s crew if they were being held hostage. “What do we think happens next?”
***
Lester Mansus was getting bored, which was nothing new for him, but it was still irritating. He’d started his life in a Luddite colony on the surface, born to a surrogate mother and raised by a collective household. The settlement’s aversion to technology meant they lived on a much thinner margin of survival than most Cult settlements, with most of their days occupied by the routine of growing food and maintaining rudimentary systems, with too much emphasis on routine and hard work for Lester’s tastes. At around the age of thirteen, he’d registered with the nihilists as his faction within the Consensus with the sole objective of annoying the colony elders, and his faction mates vehemently approved of his reasoning. For a time, Lester had felt comforted by the attention he received from the people around him and the emotional support he received from his faction until the day the elders kicked him out and put him on a caravan headed to the Reef.
Life in the Reef was good. There was always something new to do, new to see, new to learn. It was Lester’s first exposure to the wider Cult, to the other major factions, and to the possibility of life and a career beyond Lumiara. He applied for the wayfinder program to go bring light and blessed science to the unwashed savs of one of the outworld habitats, and he made it pretty far because most of the other nihilists couldn’t bring themselves to care, but that was where Lester ran into one of the first real barriers to his life journey: he wasn’t good enough. Being a wayfinder required what Lester considered to be an insufferable academic bent, a love of reports and data, and a degree of empathy he didn’t have. Worse, he didn’t have the work ethic to make himself better. After the third testing attempt, with his frustration growing while his scores actually decreased, Lester was offered training programs and even medication to overcome what was deemed to be his “problem,” but Lester refused. If the wayfinder program wouldn’t take him as he was, he probably wouldn’t enjoy it, anyway.
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He continued to drift through the Reef for a few years, but that first real rejection took much of the flavor out of past activities. Former “friends” now seemed to judge him for his failure, or at least that was what he imagined. He withdrew from the discussions, the parties, and the other excesses nihilists availed themselves of and, after a brief stay in the Sump, found himself on a submarine headed to the undersea.
And, once again, life was good. The undersea always had work for a wandering jack of all trades, and that was where Lester thought he really shined. He was able to work long shifts for short seasons or bounce between several jobs if work was short and credits were good. The sting of not making it into the wayfinder program faded, and Lester found a sort of joy in drifting from ship to ship and monastery to monastery, reinventing himself each time, thinking maybe his next iteration would be the one that would make him content. He did notice that his off-duty activities were trending to the more extreme—more holos, more drugs, more overnight companions, and more confused mornings. After one particularly bad night in Port L’Évèque, he woke up in a medical pod with no recollection of what he’d done to need it.
He was still hooked to the machine when his supervisor told him he was fired, and that if he didn’t change how he was living, he’d probably end up dead.
It was a literal wakeup call for Lester, in that he’d mostly moved on before he could get fired over the years, and some of the harsh truths his boss told him through the glass were things he’d seen in himself in previous roles and stations, and he realized that it was almost too late.
He had the medbot flush the physical dependencies out of his system, locked himself into an immersive learning pod, and emerged two months later with a mining rig operator’s license. Qualified technicians were in short supply, so he was soon assigned to Mining Station Alpha-Twenty-One, where he became a vital part of keeping Port L’Évèque and the Correas Trench supplied with alloys and structural polysteel. It was a one-year contract, and he was generally appreciated by the crew and good at the work. Life on the rig wasn’t that different from his early life in the Luddite colony, and during the first months, he wondered if he might not go back to the surface and see if things had really been all that bad.
Within six months, once he’d explored every facet of onboard life and exhausted the med station’s limited supply of mood adjusters, he’d discovered he hated life on the rig with an intensity that bordered on obsession. He was one of the first to sign on when others had talked of walking off the job, and he’d been one of the strongest advocates of turning to piracy rather than accepting the penalties for breaking their contract.
Now, with the crew of the supply ship in Ore Bay Delta and the comforting weight of a shotgun in his hands, Lester wondered if the life of an outlaw might not have been the thing he’d been looking for all along, a life without safety lines, a life without constraints.
His eyes widened as cool ceramic snaked around his neck and squeezed so hard it felt like his head would pop.
“Sorry, mate, but it’s time to disappear,” the man behind him whispered in his ear.
Lester tried to comm for help, but the network was down. The shotgun clattered on the floor as he tried to pry the cybernetic arm from around him. Another failure, he thought as he went limp and his sight went dark, but he could hear for a few seconds before he lost consciousness.
“You are such a cheeseball.”
“What are you talking about, mate? That was awesome.”
***
Janus cranked the wheel to lock the door down. The supply submarine crew hadn’t been happy to be shut in instead of rescued, but they also understood things were about to get a lot more dangerous inside the rig.
“Are we ready?” Syn asked.
“Do it,” Janus said.
A faint sonar ping rang throughout the hull.