John Ayliff - Belt Three

Like the doors, shuttle control had a local override, a fail-safe so that the crew could evacuate in the case of a ship-wide malfunction. There was even a local belt display based on the shuttle bay’s own lidar. At the moment it showed a binary pair of rocks, the smaller of which had a habitation beacon. Jonas grinned. If he could reach that outpost he would be home free.

An intercom on the control board crackled to life.

‘That’s as far as you get, true-born.’ The voice was breathless and uneven, but it was Keldra’s. She sounded as if she was running.

Jonas leaned in to the intercom. ‘How did you survive?’

‘This ship won’t let me die.’

He stabbed the controls to prep one of the shuttles for launch. ‘I’ve got shuttle control. You can’t stop me leaving.’

‘I’ve got fire control. If you launch one of those shuttles I’ll blow it out of space.’

He hesitated. ‘You wouldn’t. You want me alive for ransom.’

‘You think I make empty threats?’

A chime sounded to signal that launch prep was done, and a hatch hissed open. Jonas stared at the cramped, cocoon-like space beyond. With the system running on local override, there was no way to launch a shuttle except from inside it.

Servitor-Ayla was standing behind him, obedient and alert, the combat programme scanning the room for threats to its master. Her face was expressionless; the woman behind it was already dead.

‘Servitor,’ Jonas said slowly, ‘go into that shuttle and use the launch control.’

Servitor-Ayla paused, and, for a moment, Jonas thought that the command to launch a shuttle had been too complex for the combat programme, but then she walked forward and climbed through the hatch. Jonas watched through the floor window as the clamps released and the shuttle fell away from the hull, drifting to one side as the Coriolis effect took it away from the shuttle bay. Ayla was visible momentarily through the tiny filtered window, before the thrusters fired and the shuttle dwindled to a point.

A missile streaked across the window. The shuttle exploded into a million glittering shards.

Jonas punched the side of the control panel in frustration. Now there was nowhere he could run. Involuntarily, he thought back to what Keldra had said about consciousness surviving a mind-wipe. He knew it wasn’t true, but if it was, then letting her destroy Ayla’s body had been the most merciful thing.

The door from the corridor opened. Jonas turned just in time to see Keldra powering across the floor towards him. Before he could move she grabbed his throat and slammed him against the wall.

‘You don’t steal from a thief.’

He wriggled in her grip. She pulled upwards, choking him and nearly lifting him off his feet. A pair of burly servitors entered behind her and trained their nerve guns on him.

‘You don’t steal from a thief,’ she repeated. ‘You steal from a business owner, they have insurance, they have law enforcement. They have their true-born family to help them out. A thief doesn’t have all that.’ Her grip tightened, making his eyes water. ‘You steal from a thief and they’ll hunt you down and kill you as a warning to everyone else, because you don’t steal from a thief . You don’t steal from me .’ She released him and he doubled over, gasping. ‘Why didn’t you wait? I could ransom you to your family. That’s the way this normally goes.’

Jonas lay against the wall, feeling his throat. He could taste blood in his mouth. The game was up; she had already shown she was prepared to kill him rather than let him escape. He might as well tell the truth for once.

‘I’m not a true-born,’ he croaked.

Keldra delivered a swift kick to his ribs. ‘What’s your name, clone ?’

‘Jonas 2477-Athens-20219, Administrator.’

She kicked him again, less hard this time. ‘Bastard. I lost a good shuttle because of you.’ She looked down at him, calculating. ‘What happened? How’d you get where you are?’

‘Gabriel Reinhardt was a Scriber. He Immolated six years ago. The Belt Three branch of Reinhardt Industries should have passed to his next of kin, but…’

‘You took over.’ She smiled slyly. Was that admiration Jonas saw on her face, or did she just like the thought of a true-born family being screwed over?

‘I was his personal assistant, so I had access to nearly everything,’ he said. ‘I fired all the staff who knew his face, and rebuilt the business. His family’s up in Belt Four. He didn’t talk to them much, and they never knew he was a Scriber.’

‘But if I ransomed you to them, they’d know you weren’t him. Hah.’ Keldra was still looking thoughtful, as if sizing him up for something. ‘You’d still have been living like that if that Worldbreaker hadn’t shown up. You must hate the Worldbreakers.’

‘Hate the Worldbreakers?’ Jonas looked up, incredulous, trying to work out if she was serious. ‘I hate you, you damn pirate! There’s no point hating the Worldbreakers. They’re just there . There’s nothing we can do about them.’

Keldra grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him to his feet, her eyes flaring with a resurgence of anger. ‘No point. Nothing we can do,’ she mimicked acidly. She thrust his face into the local belt display. ‘Do you know what that rock is?’

The local belt display showed two bodies near the Remembrance of Clouds . One of them was flagged as having a habitation beacon, but the display did not show any more information; the other was dark, visible only as a lidar trace. A pair of rocks orbiting a common centre, one of which was inhabited: any number of outposts in the belts matched that description.

‘What? No. It could be anywhere.’

‘It’s LN-411.’

‘But LN-411’s a lone rock, it doesn’t have…oh God.’ An awful chill ran through his body, quite different from the mundane fear of enslavement by a pirate. The other rock was the Worldbreaker.

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