by Matthew Castleman
‘PLEASE STATE YOUR name for the record.’
‘Anders, Emiko C.’
There was no reason for the room to be as dark as it was. It seemed like the black table and chair had been scraped together from the last dead matter in the universe, huddled close as a metre in every direction the world dropped off to nothing.
‘Please state your title and a brief description of your duties.’
‘Vice Chief of Tactical Services for Sternmeier-Khan. I devise, coordinate and implement direct action initiatives, overseeing logistics, team assembly and outfit, and in some cases, adding my own skill set in the field.’
‘Would you mind re-phrasing your job description in plainer language?’
‘I find and kill people when SK decides those people should die.’
A low triple-bleep bubbled up from somewhere.
‘Would you mind re-phrasing your job description in slightly less plain language?’
Emiko gave a flat smile to the nothing and rested a hand on the table.
‘I deter threats to SK personnel or the stability of SK as a company.’
‘The threat in this instance?’
Emiko drummed her fingers on the table once.
‘An old man.’
Yuri Ruiz often had trouble with his hand. Sometimes it was the old batteries. Others it was the temperature, which the spinning habitat of Nova Beograd had trouble keeping constant. He smacked it twice against the aluminium cotframe. It made a hum and a click and his fingers opened up.
Two steps from his cot he was out the door, hearing it creak shut behind him. That creak made something rustle in his head. Something had sounded like that somewhere he’d lived before. Maybe it would trickle back later today, the way other moments had recently.
Down the narrow passage was the little cafe called Nemanja’s, known for serving real muffins one day a week. He got his breakfast of strong tea, blackened synth bacon and kelp toast and sat in his seat by the far wall. Four minutes later his friend Bill sat opposite, having brought his own mug from home as always and filled it brimming with carbon-black coffee. He set the mug, which read EROS TUNNEL RATS LOCAL 30, on the faint ring it had worn in the table.
‘Bill,’ Yuri said between first and second bites.
‘Yuri. What you got in your datebook today?’
‘Well,’ Yuri said, toast halting in front of his face. ‘I had thought about taking a walk.’
‘You’re out of control,’ Bill said, sipping and smiling. His expression got softer. ‘Any new ones this morning?’
‘One,’ said Yuri. ‘The sound my door makes when it shuts. A long time ago, something made just that creak. That’s what I plan on pondering while I walk.’
The cafe’s breakfast crowd had settled in. Nova Beograd was more than half retired asteroid excavators and miners. The rest was a scattershot of people who hadn’t found anywhere else in the Belt to settle or didn’t want to be near the population centres.
‘I’m due a note to my daughter,’ Bill said. ‘She’s doing well for herself on Ceres.’
‘I read her reports every day,’ Yuri said. ‘She’s become a sharp journalist.’
Yuri took his last swig of cooling black tea. His stroll wasn’t going to go on itself.
‘What threat did a retired miner pose?’
‘He worked a Sternmeier-Khan ice rig,’ Emiko said. ‘H21-5. Conditions were structurally and ethically bankrupt on a good day. The accident was inevitable, Yuri Ruiz the sole survivor. While he was in surgery, somebody higher up had hippocampal blots put in. There wasn’t time for precision, so about everything between age thirty and the accident was blotted.’
‘And memory loss was easily explained by injury.’
‘Right.’ Emiko’s eyes had been augmented for light amp in her Belt Coalition special ops days, yet everything past her knees was stubborn shadow. ‘The blots are chemical. Woven into their structure is a signalling protein. If the blot starts to break down, the protein will come out in sweat, urine, and turn slightly radioactive. SK got a ping.’
‘Which is why they called you.’
‘Which is why they called me.’
‘What plan did you devise?’
‘Nova Beograd is a close community,’ Emiko said. ‘Slipping somebody inside to do the job would be difficult to hide. Everyone shares the same air and water supply, so patching in a poison was out of the question. It had to be convincing as an accident.’ Her mind flashed over a few highlights from her military career. She wondered what it would feel like if her brain couldn’t do that. ‘I was the top sniper in the Belt Coalition Forces in my day. I got a funny idea.
‘Micrometeors zip around the Belt constantly. Between the amount of space out here, hull plating and active countermeasures, they’re almost never a problem. But every so often, one little stone slips through. Nova Beograd’s not exactly state of the art. Things happen.’
Nova Beograd was warrenlike, but three broad thoroughfares ringed the cylinder, one at the centre and one near each end. Most of the habitat’s oxygen cycling was done with algae, but here there were shrubs and bushes, even some small trees stuck in hydroponic bulbs nestled in crevices, basking in impostor sunlight.
Yuri played the creak in his head like a looped audio file. Each time, he breathed deep and tried to let whatever images might be tied to it get tugged into his mind.
With one breath, he picked up the scent of burnt synth-espresso. A picture wrenched itself free of whatever neural web it had been gummed up in.
A little plastic walled break room, barely the size of a walk in closet. It was the first ice rig he’d ever worked. His shiftmate couldn’t go two hours without a caffeine hit. The handle of the little espresso machine made that peculiar creak.
He made for his room to start jotting.
‘Most snipers work with one or two spotters, maybe aerial or orbital surveillance if it’s a really long shot,’ Emiko said. ‘I had a ballistics PhD, three weapons techs, an ace pilot and two hackers on this with me.
‘I had to hit a man-sized target through the hull of a station spinning at .6 g, from far enough away that nobody nearby would notice me, using an actual micrometeor as a bullet. Luck had it, Yuri gave me a little help. The spin of the station and its position in space aren’t terrible to follow. It’s predicting a freely moving person’s position that causes problems. Yuri, though, always ate breakfast at the same time, in the same cafe, at the same seat with the same person. It happens that Nemanja’s Cafe is close to the outer hull, and a thin spot at that, but still auto-sealing. Once the projectile went through, the hole would close itself up before serious de-press. Clean.’
‘What happened next?’
Yuri smacked his hand into compliance the next morning and headed to breakfast. He hadn’t slept well. More old stuff had churned up in the night. Just little flashes, but it was something bad. Frightening. Violent. He wasn’t so sure he wanted this one back.
‘Our pilot slipped our asteroid-lookalike sniper’s blind into distant synchronous orbit with Nova Beograd’s spin and kept us there. Relatively speaking, I had a stationary target.
‘I had a computer that normally handled telemetry for torpedo gunboats hooked into my weapon, feeding me data via hardwired neurolink.’ Emiko brushed the plug at the base of her neck. ‘My visual cortex was usurped. I could see Nova Beograd like I was floating right outside of it with no helmet. My techs checked the stone bullet and loaded.’
Yuri sat down with his synth bacon, kelp toast and tea. Bill sat down with his coffee.
‘Why is it you never eat here?’ Yuri said, stretching out his back.
‘Never liked breakfast,’ Bill said. ‘I always worked better if I was a little hungry and on edge through the morning. Habit stuck with me.’
Yuri nodded.
‘I remembered what my door sounds like. A coffee maker on my first ice rig.’
‘You icers always got the perks,’ Bill said, shaking his head. ‘I dug out the heart of an asteroid so people could live in it and I was lucky if I got solid food twice a week.’
‘You’re welcome for not dying of thirst while you were doing that,’ Yuri said. ‘At least there’s the perk of getting to bitch about it now.’
Bill smiled.
‘Something else too,’ Yuri said quietly.
‘Hm?’
‘Last night. Dreams. Can’t put them together yet. But it feels unpleasant. Not sure if I want it or not.’
Bill shrugged. ‘We all got unpleasantness in our lives at some point. If you want your whole story back, you’re gonna have to take the bad with the good. But maybe you don’t. Your call, friend.’
‘My first hacker watched the feeds and let me know when Yuri was in his seat. My second piggybacked on the first’s connection and went deeper. She figured she could turn off the defence grid for seventeen seconds without any flags popping. My ballistician was live-checking the targeting computer’s predictions.
‘The lines imposed on my vision matched up and turned green. I told my hacker to crash the grid. She said go. My techs said go. I pulled the trigger.’
Yuri was on the floor, legs tangled in his chair. His ears had popped sharply, and his chest felt white hot. Bill was slumped forward with a bleeding hole in his right side. Yuri fought through the pain to look down at his chest.
‘What happened?’
‘Coffee.’
‘Excuse me?’
Emiko suppressed a grin.
‘Yuri’s friend Bill Worth was a tunnel rat on Eros. All their gear got cleaned together for efficiency, blasted with intense heat. Including their mess kit. We’d calculated every centimetre through which the projectile had to travel, including the hull of the habitat and Bill Worth’s body. But we didn’t know Bill Worth’s coffee mug was made of 8mm thick steel-tungsten alloy.’
The crumpled coffee mug fell away from where it had struck Yuri, exactly over his heart. It had a tiny piece of rock in it. Yuri grit his teeth to shove aside the pain of fractured ribs as he got to his feet. Bill wasn’t dead yet.
Hefting Bill onto his back, thankful he’d lived in full-g rotation most of his life, Yuri hobbled out of the cafe towards the emergency clinic. The dam had shattered. He remembered everything his crew had been forced to endure for more than a year on-rig, and how all of it had caught up with them, leaving most of them dead.
He’d take care of his friend, and then he’d tell everyone what he remembered. Thanks to Bill, he even had an outlet.
‘Do you have any closing comments?’
‘Yes,’ Emiko said. ‘Lesson I learned quick as a soldier. If you don’t do right by your own people, they’ll take a hard look at their coat’s colour when their friends start dying.’
She stood and waited until the door opened. As she walked out of the room, augmented eyes softening the sudden light, she checked her messages in AR.
Sara Worth, formerly Sergeant Sara Worth of the BCF, now a journalist on Ceres, had written to say that her dad had nearly died from a freak space debris accident, but was recovering. And that there was more, but she couldn’t talk about it.
Emiko smiled. SK would find out about the connection sooner than later. It was an odd piece of oversight that they hadn’t yet. But her ship was already waiting for her, Sara would need somebody to watch her back, and the Belt was a big place.
