COMRADES IN ARMS
As Atalanta approached Friendship, the colony appeared, illuminated by lights, spinning slowly in the black waste of the Asteroid Belt. It was not huge like the great Island Three habitats in Earth orbit—Friendship could have been placed inside High Africa, mirrors and antennae and all, without touching the landscape at any point—but it seemed as welcoming as its name and Karil admired its compact form. It was a variation on the Bernal design with a small O’Neill cylinder instead of a sphere. The central part consisted of a cylinder about a mile long, containing a landscape of woods and fields and small villages, bathed in the light from mirrors, and the endcaps were ablaze with windows. Located there were the hangars for ships and shuttles and mining equipment, storage lofts, and public areas. Nearby revolved an asteroid, carved up like a worm-ridden apple, huge machines still laboring on its surface.
Thomas’s smiling face appeared on the screen. “Atalanta of Ganymede,” he said. “Welcome to Friendship.”
“May we dock and board?” Loris asked.
”Yes, of course. Our hangar is a bit small for your big, beautiful ship, so we are illuminating a lock you can mate with.”
“I see it. Atty?”
“Mating now, Loris. Nice to see you, Thomas.”
“Hello, Atty. We have no AI here to conference with you, but you may access our computer as needed.”
They saw and heard Mary on another screen. “Welcome aboard,” she said. “I believe we have some friends of yours here to meet you. Aaron Ben David and Chi-Chi Li are here already. It doesn’t take that long to get here from this close to Martian aphelion.”
“Looking forward to it,” Loris said. “I take it the Professor is not here yet.”
“We expect him soon. You’ve made good time, all the way from Earth.”
“Atalanta is fleet of foot,” Karil laughed. “And nobody expects Professor Kelley to be on time. On the way out the door he remembers thirty things he forgot to do.”
Atalanta mated with a lock with a familiar clang and hiss. The lock was near the circumference on the sun side endcap, and they discovered one-sixth gravity beneath them. They cycled through and found both Thomas and Mary waiting for them. Mary embraced them, smiling, but Thomas was a little shy. He shook Karil’s hand and Loris had to grab him and hug him. Both he and Mary appeared to be struck dumb by Shadow’s beauty. Her flowing red locks and the creamy skin revealed by the insufficiently zipped baby blue shipsuit were simply striking.
“This is Shadow,” Loris said, laying an arm across the young woman’s shoulders with a certain proprietary air. “This is Thomas and Mary. Don’t let their youth fool you. They’re Elders here.”
Mary embraced Shadow, but Thomas hung back, looking dazzled.
“Well, that figures,” said a baritone voice. Aaron Ben David strode forward, looking resplendent in his curly black hair and finely chiseled beard. He towered over everyone but Loris, and beside him was Chi-Chi Li, looking childlike except for the military fatigues, the tattoos and scars, and the muscles. Both Karil and Loris were smothered in Aaron’s solid embrace.
“What figures?” Karil asked.
“You go to Earth and come back with the most beautiful woman on the planet. That’s what figures.”
A lovely smile appeared on Shadow’s face and when Aaron opened his arms and hesitated just a moment, she nearly threw herself into his embrace.
“He can’t help it,” Li laughed. “He has to charm everybody. Doesn’t even know he’s doing it half the time.”
She seemed even more childlike in Loris’s arms, and she planted a big Martian kiss on Karil’s lips. A look of astonishment passed over Aaron’s face as he felt the rock-hard muscles beneath Shadow’s lovely arms.
“When the Professor arrives,” Mary said, “There will be an assembly in the Theater. You can be introduced to everyone and meet the Council. Right now, you must be in need of a good meal. We’ll show you to the quarters we’ve set up for you.”
“That’s not necessary,” Loris said. “We’re used to bunking down in Atalanta, no matter where we go.”
“We want you to be comfortable and relaxed,” Thomas said.
“It’s a wonderful place,” Aaron said. “Someone gave up their house for us. I couldn’t think of rejecting it, myself. Besides, we have a lot of planning to do, and we should get started.”
“This way,” said Mary, and they followed her down a ramp into the wide-open spaces of the central cylinder. Friendship might have been smaller than some habitats they’d seen, but it was laid out in a similar pattern. Above them and to the right was a deciduous forest hanging in the sky, stretching a mile to the opposite endcap. Above and to the left was farmland, with paddocks and fields dotted with barns and rambling farmhouses and decorated with black and white cows and black and white sheep. And directly in front of them was a series of villages linked by wandering roads, each house with a flower garden surrounded by trim hedges. After a day of hard labor in a p-suit inside a rock, it must have been a lovely place to come home to.
With all the trillions in trade possessed by the High Companies of Earth, they had nothing more charming and lovely than this. Considering the slim profit margin from asteroid mining, it must have taken generations to put this jewel together.
“It’s only a few steps from your ship,” Mary said as they walked down a hill to a charming small house on the edge of the village. Inside were several bedrooms on two floors. Smiling youngsters had spread a meal on the big kitchen table.
“Reminds me of the dining room in a Martian commune,” Li said.
“Very much that feeling of warmth,” Aaron added. “ Hospitality is the same everywhere. Regardless of how much you have to share.”
“We know,” Mary said, “that you are all risking your lives for us. I can’t tell you how grateful we are. We felt so…vulnerable. But looking at you now, I feel like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. We hope to be of help in some way, but…”
“But you have neither the required skills nor the necessary attitude,” Shadow said. “It’s a terrible thing to kill a human being. I was raised for it, and I know how it scars you inside. That is one of the things we need to protect you from.”
***
After the meal, Karil and Aaron went out into the garden and looked over the landscape. Aaron pointed out an interesting feature. An elevator shaft rose from the center of the village to the center of the cylinder, to join identical shafts rising from a clearing in the forest and one rising from a sheep-meadow to converge on a structure in the sky, where there would be no gravity at all.
“That’s for sky-diving and parasailing,” Aaron said. “When I first laid my eyes on it, I thought one thing.”
“A perfect sharpshooter’s nest,” said Karil.
“Absolutely. With an infra-red scope…”
“And skills like yours…”
“…no-one could hide here. And look at the far endcap. Over there is the shelter, containing a conference room and an auditorium, where the whole population can ride out a solar flare. It’s nearly impenetrable and will hold the entire population. If we convince the islanders to lock themselves in there, we will have the whole colony to set up as a killing field.”
“We could set traps,” Karil said. “And you know what else? If Atty plugged into the colony computer, she could control every hatch, every lock, every door in the place. I don’t know how many troops Cuchillo has…”
“The Ancilius Group says about forty.”
“…we could isolate them in groups, divide them up into manageable numbers.” Karil thought some more. “I imagine you’ve been studying the plans.”
“Of course. Thomas showed me the whole thing.”
“So how many paths run through the colony from one end to the other?”
Aaron waved his hand about the cylinder around them. “There are three roads here, one down the center of the villages, one through the woods, one through the pastureland. There’s one subway tunnel right below us, with stops at each village, designed for both passengers and freight, and it runs constantly. And there are catwalks in the superstructure, giving access to exit locks, the agricultural toruses, the engine room that controls the gravitational spin, and the ship hangars, with blast-doors everywhere.”
“Good beginning. Anything else for now?”
“Yes, Karil. What’s the deal with Shadow?”
“Galilean Security put us onto her. They knew where she was and most of her history. Ever heard of the Quasi Police Supersoldier Project?”
“Yes, but I thought they all died.”
“Not quite. Shadow survived and escaped. When we found her, she was running the Underground Railroad in Nueva York, with both the NYSD and the Quasi after her.”
“I felt those arms of hers. I thought she was going to crush me.”
“Her thighs are the same.”
“No, I don’t want to hear this.”
“We started her training on Luna. Just to get her used to low gravity. She beat the crap out of us.”
“No shit. You and Loris?”
“Yes.”
“Both of you? Together?”
“Yes”
“Wow! You two are a well-oiled machine. I swear to God you can read each other’s minds.”
“Well, it seemed to me like she knew our strikes ahead of time. Like we were telegraphing every move. And she’s fast. Sometimes I thought I was moving in slow motion. She can shoot too.”
“And I suppose you both fell in love with her instantly.”
“Pretty much.”
“Why is she called Shadow?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was White Shadow to begin with. Or because she moves like a ninja’s shadow. Or because she knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, who knows? What’s the deal with Li? I thought you guys couldn’t stand each other.”
“Things change.”
The mirrors began to close, and the landscape grew dark. Lights flickered on in the town, and they heard the sounds of dogs barking, sheep bleating, cattle lowing as the farmers brought them home. They turned and went inside. The furniture had been moved back in the living room and Chi-Chi Li was enjoying herself immensely, watching Loris and Shadow sparring.
“Shadow mentioned the Coriolis forces here,” Li said, “and how the gravity doesn’t feel like gravity on a planet. So, Loris is training her.”
Karil and Aaron sat down. The women had basically stripped down to their skivvies and were grappling, trying to throw each other onto the carpet. For a few minutes, the men watched them, dark body and white, soaked in sweat. After a while, Aaron stood up.
“I’ll be in my bunk,” he said.
Chi-Chi Li called after him. “I’m coming with you. Don’t waste it.” She followed him into the room, slapping his hard ass. After a few more minutes, Loris called time out and she and Shadow hung on each other.
“So,” Karil said. “Who’s for a nice hot shower and a massage?”
***
Karil awoke to the dawn chorus of birds and distant farm animals. For a moment, he lay there listening, thinking what a nice place this would be to live in, but knowing he would not want to work as hard as these people did. Then, he made a quick trip to the bathroom and headed for the door. He stopped and looked at Loris and Shadow snuggled in sleep, Loris’s arm thrown protectively over Shadow. Who was capable of protecting who? But he supposed Loris was used to being watched over by Atty and Karil, and Shadow had never had anyone to watch over her in her life. He really wanted to crawl back into that bed again.
“Atty, why am I doing this?”
Her soothing voice came over the speaker by the bed. “Because you are in serious need of sustenance after your rather strenuous workout last night. And because the smell of coffee will awaken Loris soon and Shadow can deal with Morning Loris better than you can.”
She was right, of course. Already he was salivating at the scents drifting up the stairs from the kitchen.
“Karil,” Atty went on, “you might want to put on a robe. There are young ladies cooking downstairs and, though they might enjoy seeing you as you are now, you are a guest and that would be impolite. There is a surprise for you, incidentally.”
And she was right again. He threw on a robe and went downstairs to find a cyborg at the table. He was eating breakfast with a fork attachment on his steel arm, no doubt plucked from the belt of tools and other attachments on his belt. Two giggling girls placed a cup of coffee and a plate of farm-fresh scrambled eggs before Karil. He looked up and smiled at them.
Karil stuck out his hand toward the cyborg. “I’m Karil, he said. “I guess the Professor has arrived.”
The cyborg paused for a moment. No doubt he often found strangers hesitant to touch the claw-like steel hands he bore.
“I live on Ganymede,” Karil said. “I’ve seen cyborgs before. Trust me.”
Except for the camera lens in his left eye, the stranger smiled. He removed the fork, put it down, and shook Karil’s hand, careful not to crush it to jelly.
“I’m called Toro. We arrived last night,” he said in his synthesized voice. “On board Celeste.”
“Ah! Celeste. Are you listening too?”
“I am, Karil. Good morning,” she said in her lilting alto with the slight touch of Irish accent Karil loved so much. “Atalanta and I have been sharing information all night and we know the computer system aboard Friendship very well. I gave her 20,000 of the Professor’s books for her library. It took 12 seconds to download them. I look forward to meeting Shadow.”
The girls at the stove began to giggle again. Karil smiled at them and paid attention to the eggs, washed down with excellent coffee, which had probably been ground from beans grown in the agricultural toruses. He was studying Toro out of the corner of his eye. Typical cloud-miner, he thought, not very tall, short legs like tree-trunks, wide shoulders and long, powerful arms. Three gravities would be nothing to him. Metal plates indicated a multitude of injuries, and both his legs had been replaced with robotic titanium.
“The Professor,” Karil said as he sat back with his second coffee,” said something about coming with a couple fighters.”
“I did indeed,” said a baritone voice. Karil glanced up as Professor Kelley came in. He dumped four duffel bags on the floor, three of which obviously contained rifles. Karil rose and pretty much disappeared into the bearded, red-haired giant’s embrace.
“Wonderful to see you again, Lad,” he boomed. “I’m the second soldier you mention.”
“That’s wonderful.” Kelley’s military exploits were several years in the past, but his embrace proved that he was still in great shape. Of course! Kelley had a state-of-the-art training centre. The cyborgs would use it every day.
The Professor had no sooner sat down to breakfast than Loris and Shadow appeared. Loris bent over and kissed Kelley’s shaggy head and hugged him around the neck. She said nothing until plied with steaming coffee. Shadow seemed intimidated by both Toro and Kelley, who—let’s face it—we’re huge and impressive, each in their own way.
“This is Shadow,” Loris told them. “Don’t let her beauty fool you. There’s nothing of the fragile doll about her and she can hold her own in this group.”
Kelley gave her his most charming smile. “I’ve been briefed by Galilean Security,” he said. “They probably know more about you than anyone else in the system, and they don’t know much. Most of it sounds like legend, and I say keep it that way. Hanging around with these two…” He nodded toward Karil and Loris. “…will help create legends, I’m sure.”
“I’ll say,” said a baritone voice from the door. “I was there for half of it, and I still don’t believe it.” Aaron and Li appeared at the door, dressed in fatigues.
“I thought you were still in bed,” Karil told them.
“We got up before dawn and jogged down to the far end-cap and back,” Li said. She turned to the girls in the kitchen who were scrambling eggs and scrambling to make more coffee. “This is a beautiful place here. No wonder Cuchillo and his gang think you’re made of money. They don’t understand hard work. The Quasi think of Martians the same way. They see our beautiful caverns and think we’re hiding treasure.”
Aaron brought her over to meet Kelley, who like a gentleman started to stand up. “Sit down,” Li laughed. “You’re the same height as me now. My neck already hurts from looking up at this guy all day.” She jerked her head toward Aaron.
“This is the infamous Chi-Chi Li,” said Aaron. “A lot of the Quasi’s finest have misjudged her to their regret.”
“I can believe that,” Kelley laughed. "But I've seen her before. Saw her fight too. How are you, Darling?" She threw her arms around the Professor—no wonder she wanted him to stay seated—and he felt the muscles rippling in her small body.
“I'm okay, but I look like twelve klicks of Noachis badlands.”
The Professor’s Irish green eyes bored into hers. “You are extremely beautiful,” he said.
“What a charmer,” she laughed. “Are you sure you’re not related?”
“It’s the beard.” Aaron said and jerked his head toward Karil. “Wait till he can grow one.”
Karil grinned at the jibe.
“God, no,” Loris laughed. “Why do you think I carry a stick all the time? It’s to beat them off him. Though I don’t mind the side benefits.”
Shadow punched her in the arm and Loris let out a yell, pretending to have been severely injured. Shadow’s liquid eyes met Karil’s and she smiled. Karil was pretty sure she had never been a part of banter and camaraderie like this in her life. Somehow, it happened that everyone challenged Shadow to arm-wrestling. She defeated everyone with ease, except that Toro refused to join in. Just as well, Karil thought; he might rip her arm off by mistake.
The table by now was filled with steaming omelettes and coffee, and pancakes and syrup, and even milk fresh from the dairy. Karil looked about the table at the seven seated there, brought together to visit justice upon those who prey on the defenseless. He hoped that everyone would survive, but he felt somehow that some would not and knew that in the end his heart would be broken again.
***
Later in the morning, Thomas and Mary showed up to take them to the Theater. The party walked, full of good food and good spirits, into the center of the village and down a ramp.
“You have a subway?” Shadow laughed.
“It’s only a mile long,” Thomas said. “One cap to the other, to connect with the elevators. It’s mostly for cargo, but we use it for people-moving in a hurry. If we get warning of a solar flare or cosmic rays, we can transport the whole population to the shelter in short order.
They descended to the platform and Shadow looked all around. “It’s very clean” she said in surprise.
Kelley laughed. “It’s not Nueva York. Their subway was built two and a half centuries ago and is inhabited by the homeless.”
“I know,” Shadow said. “I’m one of them.”
Silently, the train slipped into the station, magnetically levitated. Shadow peered up at the top of the cars.
“What’s the clearance up there?”
“About half a meter,” Mary said.
“All the way?”
“Oh yes, sometimes we transport large objects on flatcars.”
“Really.”
They boarded the car beside them and rode to the far end of the colony. The shelter was just up a short ramp. Following the sound of voices, they entered the auditorium to find what must have been every adult resident of Friendship gathered together—at least, those not working on the asteroid. The work never stops in the Belt. The seating was in concentric circles, so that everyone faced the center, where the Elders sat. The Professor knew them—First Elder Gurney, Hicks, Fry, and Hill, and young Thomas Fell and Mary Forster. The seven newcomers sat down facing them and First Elder Gurney rapped his cane on the floor for attention. The room fell silent, and the Professor stood.
“I am Charles Kelley,” he said. “Many of you know me, especially the older generation, as we’ve had business dealings for many years. I have watched the Friendship Colony grow and prosper. When Mary and Thomas came to me, explained your problem, and asked if I knew anyone who could help, I vowed to help in any way I could. I know of Captain Cuchillo and his gang, and I assure you Friendship is not his only victim. The High Companies know of him too and what he is doing, but they benefit from his actions and will do nothing, even though he is violating treaties they have signed.
“The only chance we have to convince the High Companies to stop Cuchillo from exploiting you is to prove to the entire Solar System what he is doing. To do this, they have to be caught in the act and recorded. Fortunately, we have two smart ships who can do this—Atalanta and Celeste. They will not participate in violence, but they can record it. The High Companies will declare these recordings phoney, but most of the System will believe us over them and the resulting bad publicity should make the High Companies put Cuchillo on a show trial and pretend to punish him. It should at least put him out of business.
“To keep you safe, we propose that, as soon as the Achilles arrives, you gather here as if it were any other danger from space. They will outnumber us and will try to eliminate us, but the battleground, which I fear will be your lovely colony, will be in our hands.” He fell silent for a moment, looking at the faces before him. “I was about to say something about how you could vote no, and we will respect your choice and leave. But that is not true. We cannot leave you to Cuchillo’s mercy any more than you can abandon your home and loved ones to his depredations. We have no choice. That is what evil does. It eliminates good choices and leaves only bad ones. You can only step aside and let us deal with Cuchillo in the way we know best. It may be that the only way we can preserve our lives is to take theirs as efficiently as possible.
“This is Loris and Ali Karil, originally from Earth, now working out of Ganymede. This is Aaron Ben David and Chi-Chi Li, defenders of Mars. This is Shadow, late of Nueva York, where she was involved with the Underground Railroad, as your ancestors were hundreds of years ago. And this is Toro, who has worked in Jupiter’s atmosphere and seen beauty we will probably never witness. I am Professor Charles Kelley of the Titan High Council. All of us are here to defend you and your beautiful home.”
Professor Kelley sat down, and First Elder Gurney tapped his cane. “Thank you, Professor, for your honesty. I think your words have touched all of us. I believe, though I was uncomfortable at first, that Thomas and Mary have done well to consult you, and that we would do well to follow your direction. This rough and motley band of fighters you bring are, I firmly believe, guardian angels.” He smiled. “I hope they will not be offended if I say I believe they are performing God’s will. We cannot thank you enough, but we can offer the hospitality of our home to them, should it be preserved, whenever they might need a quiet place to rest in future. I suggest we vote. All those who agree with Professor Kelley’s instructions?”
Every hand went up.
“Thank you,” the Elder said. He turned and shook hands with the elders on either side of him, indicating that the meeting was adjourned. The motley, rough guardian angels found themselves inundated with hugs. On the way back to their quarters, walking down a pleasant road through the wood, Loris dropped back to speak quietly with Kelley.
“Do you think there’s any chance Cuchillo will let us do this without slaughtering his entire crew?”
“No, I don’t. I doubt if he cares for them any more than he cares for these people. We ought to kill him on sight if we can, and Soldado and Montana as well. As for the rest of them, they might well fight to the death out of fear of being court-martialed by the High Companies. It’s not just a gang of thugs we’re facing, but the power of Earth. Let me ask you: can our people be vicious enough to do the job?”
Loris thought for a moment, watching a hawk circle above. “Well, we have two kinds of fighters here. We have trained soldiers like you and Aaron and Shadow, who will do what is necessary. And we have Karil and Li, and Toro, who will turn into berserkers if they are angry enough.”
Kelley put his arm around her shoulders. “And then there’s you, Lor, who fit into both categories. We’ll just do what we can, like we always do.”
***
The Belter colony of Serenity contained in its central Bernal sphere a complex that featured a church, a synagogue, a mosque, and a Buddhist temple, all surrounding a Lennonite park. Lennonites do not build houses of worship; they build parks. Normally, the sphere rang with joyful noise—music and singing, bells, gongs, chanting, and the lovely call to prayer—but today it rang with gunfire and screams. The park and the temple complex was littered with corpses and womenfolk sobbing over them.
Cuchillo and the crew of Swift-Footed Achilles observed their handiwork for a moment, then turned and headed back to their ship. Suddenly there were shouts. A woman had found a gun lying under her dead husband, stood up, and took aim at the departing Cuchillo. Soldato whipped out his laser and put a hole in her forehead. She fell over her husband’s corpse and the raiders left.
At the hangar, they watched the captives being loaded aboard their ship—a collection of women and girls, plus a few comely boys, being locked in cages in the hold.
“These will bring a pretty penny,” Soldado said, “when properly trained.”
“I’d rather have a shipment of nickel-iron, laced with platinum.” Cuchillo said. “I have bribes to pay. I don’t know what got into this collection of ship-people to resist us all of a sudden. It’s the damned Rohingya and Uighurs behind it, if you ask me.”
“How long has it been since we visited the Friendship bunch,” Soldato said. “They’ve always been pretty docile.”
“It’s been nearly a year now. They should be expecting us.”
“If they can’t provide enough metal, we can take some slaves this time. An escalation might be in order.”
“We’ll see if they’ve grown a backbone since the last time. I enjoyed myself today.”
Claxons sounded, hatches locked, and the ship slipped its moorings. It sped away from Serenity Colony and turned off into the darkness.