John Ayliff - Belt Three

‘Make sure your ransom is worth more than the trouble you give me,’ she said.

Jonas nodded silently. He intended to cause her a great deal of trouble – and she’d be getting no ransom, in any case – but for now he had to bide his time.

Keldra’s nerve gun dug into his back as she marched him around the orbital corridor. Any last-ditch resistance the crew had put up was over, and pirates were already beginning to strip equipment from the walls. The pirates were all servitors; he couldn’t see any free-willed humans among Keldra’s crew.

They passed a group of newly mind-wiped mining foremen putting on vacuum suits in preparation for the transfer to the other ship. Keldra prodded Ayla to join them. Now was the moment. Jonas waited a calculated second, and then rushed forward as dramatically as he could.

‘Ayla! Where are you taking her?’

Keldra grabbed his arm and brought him round to face her. ‘Oh, was she yours?’ she asked. ‘Was she special?’ The cruel smirk was back on her face, as he had hoped. ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure I can find a buyer for a pretty young thing like that.’

She let out a little snorting laugh and undid his cuffs as a servitor pushed a patched and blood-stained vacuum suit into his hands. Jonas kept his eyes on Ayla for as long as he could while he donned the suit, trying to look desperate and dejected. He had to let Keldra think she could use Ayla to hurt him. From the smug look on the pirate’s face, he thought he had succeeded.

They climbed a ladder to the centre of the cargo bay, their weight dropping off until they were in microgravity. Across the gap, the Remembrance of Clouds kept station with the Dancer , its two grav-rings casting spokes of shadow across its cargo bay. The Dancer’s bay was emptying as Keldra’s servitors sent cargo containers along the lines to the pirate ship. She put the cuffs back on Jonas and then clipped them to a personnel transfer line. As it hauled them along, they passed a pair of servitors manoeuvring uranium ore canisters across the gap.

‘You should have fought,’ Keldra said, suddenly.

‘What?’ Jonas said.

She pressed the nerve gun against his back. The shock couldn’t penetrate the vacuum suit, but the pointed tip of the weapon pressed in painfully. ‘You ran,’ she said. ‘You people always run. You should have fought.’

The prison cell was a converted cargo container a few metres wide. There were three light strips in the ceiling, but only one of them worked, so the room was filled with an eye-straining half-light. A hard-angled metal bed was bolted to the floor, and in the corner was the sealed box of a chemical toilet.

Jonas got up slowly, still nauseous from the nerve gun paralysis, and rubbed his wrists where the cuffs had dug in. He felt heavy: he estimated the ring’s gravity was close to one gee, much more than he would have expected on a pirate ship. There was a little barred window in the cell door, through which he could see a brightly lit corridor and a security camera bolted to the opposite wall. He pressed his face to the bars to see as far as he could into the corridor, but he couldn’t see any guards, or any other sign of life. The only sound was the faint rattle and gurgle of the ship’s systems.

He lay down on the bed. After what he guessed was an hour the vibration changed in tone, and the room seemed to tip sideways as a gentle new acceleration dragged him towards the wall. The Remembrance of Clouds was unfurling its sail and pulling away from whatever it had left of the Coriolis Dancer .

Sometime later he heard footsteps in the corridor. A slot at the bottom of the door opened and a tray of food slid in. He waited, but the footsteps did not depart. When he sat up on the bed he saw a face, dark against the window.

‘You should have fought,’ Keldra said.

He didn’t move. He had expected her to come to gloat, although he hadn’t expected her so soon. He glowered up at the door for a moment but said nothing. He wanted her to be angry at him, and for now the best way to achieve that would be to ignore her.

‘Eat!’ she commanded.

‘What have you done with Ayla?’ he asked.

Keldra let out a snorting laugh. ‘Eat!’

‘If you want obedience, why don’t you spike me?’

‘Don’t tempt me. I bet your family would pay something just for your body.’

Jonas went to the tray and picked it up. Keldra’s face was close to the bars. He examined her, keeping his face controlled.

‘If you spiked me, you’d have no one to talk to,’ he said. ‘We’re the only free-willed people on the ship.’ A subtle movement of her eyes told him he was right.

He sat down and began to eat. It was the tasteless, nutritious slop that servitors were fed. He grimaced, deliberately, as if he were used to only the finest true-born cuisine.

‘You should have fought.’ Keldra banged on the door, making him jump. ‘Look at me!’

He lay the spoon across the bowl and sat up haughtily. ‘You have no right to keep a true-born like this.’

That set her off. ‘You think you’re better than the rest of us. You’re not. You’re just a spoiled ruling class.’

‘You’re just a clone. My ancestors walked on Earth.’

Keldra thumped the door again, making the cell rattle. ‘You know nothing about Earth! I’m closer to Earth than any true-born. I’m a genetic duplicate of someone who lived on Earth.’

‘You’re a clone. What’s your name, clone? Your full name?’

‘To hell with you.’

‘You don’t have a name. You have a serial number. You were made .’

Keldra was leaning close to the bars, as if she were the one locked up. She seemed like a caged animal that might tear the door open at any moment. Making her angry was almost too easy. Had she come down here looking for a shouting match?

‘I’ll tell you my name,’ she said. ‘Keldra 2482-Pandora-33842, Engineer.’

Assuming it was true, that made Keldra 28-years-old. He hadn’t heard of Pandora, but there were a lot of minor Belt Three cities he didn’t know.

‘I am Gabriel Dominic Ellis Reinhardt,’ he said, slowly emphasizing each name. ‘I can trace my family tree back to people named Reinhardt and Ellis who lived on Earth. You have no such continuity. You have a serial number, clone .’

‘You’ve got a past but no future. You’re letting the human race die.’

‘True-borns are the only ones that matter.’

‘You’re letting them win!’ Keldra shouted. ‘In a few hundred years the Worldbreakers will have destroyed everything. There’ll be nowhere for us to live.’

‘There’s nothing we can do. You can’t beat the Worldbreakers. We’re living at the end of the human race.’

Keldra banged on the cell door again. ‘You should have fought!’ She disappeared from the bars and her footsteps echoed away along the corridor.

‘Don’t hurt Ayla!’ Jonas shouted after her. ‘I want her back!’

A few hours later the lights abruptly went off. Jonas lay on the bed and tried to sleep. The cell was cold but stuffy, the air not circulating properly. The faint sound he could hear resolved itself into a dozen different ship systems: rattles, hums, rhythmic thuds, and a trickle of water that sounded as though it came from just beyond the wall. There was a gentle, regular swaying sensation, as if the grav-rings were not quite properly aligned.

He still didn’t know if he had judged Keldra’s personality correctly. She seemed so volatile that he couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t forget about the ransom and slave-spike him in a fit of anger.

Six years ago he’d promised to do something worthwhile with Gabriel Reinhardt’s name. He had set out to prove that he could run a successful business while treating his tank-born employees decently, or at least better than the exploitation that was the norm. Not exactly a grand dream, now he thought about it, but even there he had failed. Gabriel Reinhardt’s uranium-mining business had survived but had not prospered. Jonas had found himself living day-to-day, plans to do more pushed to the back of his mind. Now the double blow of Worldbreaker and pirate had ended even that, his employees were dead, and there was no goal left for him but to escape and survive.