KARIL AND LORIS
The George Fox, restored to perfect order by the Professor’s engineers, plunged into the Jovian system. Thomas and Mary marveled at Jupiter’s stupendous, swirling beauty and the complex waltz of its satellites. The Ganymede icescape stretched below, and a message came over the comm from Galilean Security. Thomas identified their ship, registered to Friendship Company, and gave them the Professor’s code. They were given a berth in Ganymede City and the ship descended into the scintillating icy caverns. The Harbourmaster checked their credentials and they asked for directions to the Rim District.
He looked them up and down and immediately pegged them as Deep Belters. “Are you sure you want to go to the Rim?” he asked.
“Yes, where the Free Traders are,” Mary said.
The Harbourmaster shrugged and told them, “Take Slidewalk Twelve and ride to the end.”
“Thank you.” They turned and began to leave the berth.
“Hey, wait. Aren’t you going to lock your ship?”
“Should we?”
“Well, yes, if you want it to be there when you get back. Listen, Kids. Go back and put some kind of code-lock on your bridge controls. And put any valuables on your person inside your clothes. Don’t trust anyone, even Free Traders. Okay? Jesus!”
Once the exasperated Harbourmaster was satisfied, they rode the slidewalk, sometimes crowded and sometimes eerily empty, to the end. Mary was astonished and amused by the passersby, some wearing ancient religious garb and some wearing pretty much nothing, some in shipsuits and some in work-clothes or fancy dress, some pale with corridor-life, some burned by the sun in space, their skin in every colour Earth is heir to and speaking among themselves in dozens of languages. Many were armed, with pistol-grip lasers in holsters, and among them were cyborgs with steel appendages of all kinds. Finally, they found themselves in a long, curving corridor lined with air-lock hatches. Beside most were screens displaying the names of ships and registration numbers. They searched for Atalanta.
“We’re being followed,” Mary said.
Thomas turned to see four rather scary characters, all wearing lasers in holsters on their hips. One was a huge, broad-shouldered cyborg with red glowing eyes.
“Well, well,” said the smallest of the strangers, with the air of command about him. “What have we here?”
“We’re looking for Atalanta’s berth,” Thomas said, trying to keep the tremble out of his voice. “Do you know where we can find her?”
“We have an appointment with Loris and Karil,” Mary said quickly, hoping these people would be impressed.
They looked at each other, and two of them, one male and one female, though both impressively muscled and with scarred faces, appeared ready to leave. But the leader and the cyborg moved forward threateningly.
“Can we help you?” said a woman’s voice. Yes, it was a woman’s voice, but there was nothing feminine or friendly about it. The tones were deep, and the speech clipped, with a touch of anger in its self-assured calm. The threatening four turned and faced a pair coming down the corridor in a measured and wary pace. The woman was tall and slim and dark-skinned, with piercing black eyes, and she moved with a dancer’s grace. Beside her was a young man, frankly beautiful with milk-chocolate skin over sleek muscles, and big brown eyes that could have been warm and inviting, but right now seemed terrifying in the intensity of their gaze. At his hip was a pistol-grip laser of a kind of art-nouveau design, gleaming in a soft leather holster. His hand was motionless above it.
The woman’s arm reached back over her shoulder and unclipped a meter-long cylinder of metal from her back. She tapped it on the floor, and it instantly telescoped to double its length. She gripped it with both hands and stood with long legs far apart. Two of those threatening Thomas and Mary began to back away from their leader.
The leader reached for his laser, and it flew away across the floor, taking two of his fingers with it. The young man’s weapon had suddenly appeared in his hand as if from nowhere, now glowing white hot at the end. The leader screamed and grabbed his profusely-bleeding hand. The tall woman bounded forward and the staff in her hands bounced off the foreheads of two more attackers as if in one movement. They slid to the floor unconscious.
The cyborg seized Mary by the throat in his claw-like hands and dragged her away in his steely grip. The defenders were motionless, and Thomas was rooted to the spot. As the cyborg passed the next airlock, it irised open and emitted an ear-piercing siren-shriek that made all those still conscious clap their hands over their ears, except for the cyborg, who slid to the floor with a great thud, clearly stunned. Mary stepped away from him.
The young man holstered his laser, spinning it with an engaging grin, and the woman clipped the steel rod back onto her back. “You’re Thomas and Mary, I assume,” she said. Her voice had lost its threat and now seemed only deep and warm.
“Yes,” Thomas stammered, still shaking.
“I’m Loris and this is Karil. You’re a few days earlier than expected.”
“I think Professor Kelley souped up our ship,” Mary said, looking down at the pile of flesh and steel at her feet.
“That figures. You can come out now, Honey,” Loris called back.
A young woman appeared from around the corridor curve behind them and gawked at the wounded on the corridor floor. The leader was sobbing and moaning and holding his bleeding hand to his chest. Loris put one long arm around the girl’s shoulders. “I’m afraid we have business tonight, Baby,” Loris said, warmly. “We’ll catch you later.”
Honey nodded dumbly. She stood on tiptoe and kissed Loris passionately, then stepped into Karil’s muscular arms and kissed him just as deeply. He placed his hand between her shoulder-blades and slid it down to her buttocks. She gasped. And so did Mary, Thomas noticed. Then Honey turned and left.
Loris’s face turned to business. Thomas and Mary were ushered into the still open lock from which the siren had sounded.
“Atty, have you called Security?”
“Of course, Loris,” said a lovely, disembodied voice. “They are on the way. The gentleman is bleeding profusely, but a med-team will be here soon. However, when the cyborg awakes, he will have to have new inner ears installed. I believe I shorted them out completely.”
“Nice touch. Atty, this is Thomas and Mary from Friendship Colony. This is Atalanta.”
“Welcome aboard, Thomas, Mary. So nice to meet you,” she crooned.
“Thank you,” Mary laughed. “I’m afraid we’ve ruined Karil and Loris’s—uh—date.”
“We’ll be back,” Loris said, “and so will she. Can we offer you a drink of some kind? You seem a little shell-shocked.”
“A nice cup of the famous Free Trader Coffee would be nice.”
“Coming up, Atty said.
“We’ll join you,” Karil added. “I think we’ve had enough alcohol this evening. That’s why we performed so badly just now.”
“You seemed pretty efficient to me,” Thomas laughed.
“No, that cyborg should never have succeeded in taking Mary hostage,” Loris told him, “Come into the galley.”
Atalanta already had the coffee brewed and the smell was heavenly. They sat at the galley table, not needing to hook their ankles under the footrest in the one-sixth gravity of Ganymede, and Karil placed the cups on the table. The Free Trader Coffee lived up to its reputation. There was even real sugar, but Mary could not imagine how they managed to get real cream.
“So, tell us,” Loris said. “Exactly who is threatening you?”
As they talked, text and images concerning the Swift-Footed Achilles and her crew appeared on the screen at the far end of the table, much more detailed than those Professor Kelley had available. Clearly, these were Galilean Security files. They could see that High America consisted of two enormous cylinders, one of them fashioned after North America and one after South America. The details of the three valleys in the former were in English, French, and Spanish, those of the latter were in Spanish and Portuguese. Cuchillo had risen through the ranks quickly and ruthlessly to the captaincy of Achilles and brought his cohorts with him. Soldado was a gunman of renown and the cyborg, Montana, was probably insane.
“It happens to cyborgs fairly often,” Karil said. “They get space happy. It doesn’t help that they’re so often shunned.”
“Security has hauled away the malefactors outside and cleaned up the corridor,” Atty said.
“They don’t want to talk to us?”
“Considering the arrest-records of these individuals, I guess they’re satisfied not to involve you at all.”
Thomas and Mary seemed a little shocked. “This is a Libertarian society,” Karil told them. “Galilean Security is not a police-force. It’s a security company, the largest but not the only one in the Jovian system. The Free Traders are stockholders. They leave us alone to do our business and we do our best not to threaten security.”
“Will we be able to train you to fight?” Loris asked.
“It’s a big ask. Some of us are willing, despite our beliefs,” Thomas said, “but we have no killer instinct.”
“A killer instinct is not that useful in military training. If you ask me, it can be a huge problem. And there wouldn’t be enough time to train you anyway. It takes too long to become efficient, and these killers are efficient. I think what we need is a small group of experts who can work together quickly within the layout of your colony, so the attacking army can be funneled to the places where we want them. In battle, it’s like in real estate,” she laughed, “Location. Location. Location. We need fighters who can work in any gravity or no gravity, and we have Atty, who like you won’t kill, but she can open and close locks and control computers and herd our adversaries like cattle.”
“To the killing floor?” Thomas asked.
“If necessary, but if we do it right, we can take them prisoner without killing them and put them on trial at Ceres or even here in the Galilean, according to our treaties with the Belt, and the resulting publicity will help prevent the same thing happening again later on. You’ve probably never seen the rest of the Achilles crew, but there should be about forty of them, all well-trained. If they can be separated, isolated, rendered helpless and out of contact with each other, they need not be killed.”
“Do you know who you need and who you can count on?”
“We’re pretty sure,” Karil said. “Some of them go back a long way with us. And the people we’re thinking of will be as angry as Kelley about what’s happening to you.”
“We’re going to send you back home,” Loris added, “ We’ll confer with the Professor and contact our friends. The less you know, the better.”
They had dinner afterwards. Over drinks, Mary, who was becoming a little tipsy, said, “Karil, it’s kind of hard to believe you’re a poet.”
He laughed. “I do more than shoot people.”
“He’s kind of the poet laureate of Mars, you know,” Loris said proudly.
He chuckled, “Yes, and I’m thirteenth in line for the Sultanate of High Africa. I used to be twenty-seventh, but there have been a few deaths in my family. But I’d say my chances of attaining that power are pretty slim.”
“I’ve read Poems from the Labyrinth of Night,” Mary said.
“Really? That one? Is that in the library at Friendship Colony?”
“Not exactly,” she laughed.
Later, Thomas and Mary were given sleeping bags in one of the holds. Thomas was careful not to watch Mary stripping down to sleep in the warm ship, but she seemed not to care. Atalanta said good night like a doting mother and turned out the lights. The next day, they reclaimed George Fox, discovered that the docking fees had been paid, and returned home.
***
The upper atmosphere of Venus super-rotates, and the hurricane winds circle the planet in only four hours. Below the 200 mph winds, below the sulfuric acid clouds, the winds on the surface are more like gentle breezes, except that the carbon-dioxide is so crushingly heavy that it might as well be 3000 feet under water, the temperature is like a blast-furnace, and despite its nearness to the sun, the landscape is dark and gloomy. Here, in arguably the worst place in the solar system, named for the Goddess of Love, is a prison, where the most incorrigible and ungovernable prisoners live out their short lives, serving little purpose other than keeping the main body of prisoners in orbit above too frightened to cause trouble. Few dare risk a stretch in the Hole, or the Oven, or Hell, as it is called.
Toro had been in the Hole for three years after killing a fellow prisoner. His sentence was only five years because that was the life-expectancy in the Hole. Toro was a cyborg, bred short and powerful with huge arms and shoulders and relatively weak lower limbs, to work under the crushing three gravities in the upper cloud-decks of Jupiter, where the hydrogen-helium atmosphere is mined and refined into spaceship fuel. As always throughout history, miners were poorly paid for dangerous work and died young. Because of the robotic look of their artificial limbs, eyes, and hearing, the often claw-like hands and the immobile faces, they were shunned by polite society. This tended to make them angry, anti-social, and violent.
Toro heard a fellow prisoner shouting. He tried to ignore the sound, not get involved, but the shouting turned to sobbing and pleading and he had to respond. He found a young prisoner being raped by an older man in the workshop. Without thinking, he pulled the man off and tossed him aside. The man pulled a hand-made knife and stabbed Toro. Fortunately, the blade struck a steel plate over Toro’s heart and broke off. Toro tossed the man aside again, and he came after Toro with a quickly seized wrench. He struck Toro’s head with a clang, only partly deflected by another plate, and Toro’s head rang with the blow, and he was nearly struck unconscious. Toro picked up the man and threw him against the wall. He collided head-first and his neck snapped. By this time Toro was surrounded by guards armed with powerful tasers and he was struck many times. He collapsed to the floor and lay trembling. It was not long before he appeared, shackled and cuffed, before the Warden. The fact that the threatened young man had begged for leniency for Toro meant nothing.
“You have denied us four years’ labour by the man you killed, so your sentence is increased by four years,” the Warden said. “You’re lucky it was not a guard you attacked, or you would already be dead, crushed and incinerated by exposure to the atmosphere.”
This probably meant that Toro would not survive to be to be shuffled topside again, where he could live a reasonably long life in the orbiting colony with only hard labour ahead of him. He began to plead for leniency and was cut off.
“I know you don’t know your own strength. I hear that from most cyborgs. People come up against you, and you have a habit of killing them.”
“The strong prey on the weak here,” Toro said. “I know none of us are innocent except the political prisoners, but I still can’t watch some things happen.”
The Warden observed him for a while. “Well, Number 452, this is your lucky day. You’re pardoned.”
“Pardoned? How?”
“You have been bought. Your sentence has been reduced to indenture.”
“By who?”
“By Professor Kelley, your old boss.”
“But the man I killed worked for him too. Kelley testified against me.”
“Well, he says the man you killed basically had it coming, and he was in error. He thinks you stopped the man from committing worse crimes than yours and thus performed a service. Don’t ask. Just accept your good fortune. You don’t get much of that in Hell. You will be transferred topside in the next shuttle.” He glanced at the schedule on the wall. “Cerberus Three in half an hour. Kelley has sent a ship to pick you up. You are now officially not my problem.”
Toro was stunned. He sat silent.
“I considered demanding more money,” the Warden said, “since you owe us four more years, but I thought my superiors would not want to cross Kelley, despite their dislike of the man. The guard will take you to your cell now, so you can collect your kit.”
Toro rose, baffled, and turned to leave. He paused. “Thank you,” he said.
“Just try not to kill anyone else on your way out.”
Toro left and accompanied by the guard, returned to his cell to pick up his meagre belongings. He waited in the docking bay. Cerberus Three descended and connected to the lock and he boarded, by himself. Nobody else was being released. The ship rose through the poisonous gloom as the sulfuric acid boiled on the ports, and then it was buffeted by the racing winds of the upper atmosphere until it emerged into sunlight. The sun blazed brightly and the stars as well. The shuttle docked at the huge revolving colony and Toro followed a man with a blinking clipboard down the corridor. A hatch opened and he stepped into a small ship, in which lights blazed and the air-conditioner sighed like a living thing. He was startled by the soothing sound of a woman’s voice.
“I am Celeste. Welcome aboard, Mister Toro. Please strap yourself into your acceleration couch. I assume three gravities would not be uncomfortable for you.”
Toro found himself shedding a tear at the sound of a woman’s voice. “It’s been a while,” he said, “but I wouldn’t mind feeling my full weight. It would feel like home.”
“Excellent. From here to the Belt is a long trip, but we will make good time. There’s a bed and food, I’m quite sure both superior to what you have become used to, and I think the trip will be pleasant for you.”
The ship began to vibrate, and it detached from the lock. It plunged into space, and on a screen, Toro saw the great colony spinning away over the yellow haze of Venus. He felt weight upon him, and he was crushed into his couch in what would have been nearly intolerable pressure to a mere human, but his stout limbs and powerful heart rejoiced in it. Acceleration continued for some time and eventually stopped as the ship fell at great speed through the Solar System.
“What is your name?” Toro asked. “Not yours, Celeste, but the ship’s.”
“Celestial Intelligencer.”
“I will think of you as Celeste. A creature of heaven. You are the angel who plucked me out of Hell.”
“Professor Kelley did that. I like to think of him as Hercules, who performs great labours like building habitats and starships and the mining works of Titan. He told me his favourite story of Hercules, who felt so much remorse at disturbing his host’s mourning with his drunken carousing that he went straight down to Hell and brought the man’s wife back to him. And he freed Prometheus, who had been made to suffer for giving fire to Man. He considers Hercules the patron god of engineers.”
“But why me?”
“Because he believes he did you wrong. He has studied your record, and he has a job for you, which he believes will give you purpose, should you accept.”