“Believe me, I’d hate to keep you any longer than you need to,” Delagarza told her, still smiling.
He climbed the shuttle’s unfolded stairs before Krieger had a chance to mull over his words.
A pilot waited at the cockpit already.
“You’ll need to strap a pressure suit,” the pilot told him as Delagarza fought his way across the tight, cramped deck.
“Aren’t we pressurized?” Delagarza had traveled in one of these only once in his life, the day he arrived at Dione, and the memory was fuzzy.
“Wrong question,” the man said. He didn’t explain what the right question was, so Delagarza shrugged and did as he was told. The pressurized suits were kept in a locker at the end of the deck. He discovered that the suit wouldn’t fit over his reg-suit, so he had to undress and then slowly step into the pressure suit.
After he finished, the shuttle was ready to launch. Delagarza strapped to his seat, listened to the pilot’s brief chatter with flight control, and watched in awe at the gigantic crane hand that enveloped the ship in long, loving fingers, before pushing it to open space.
The pilot turned on the hydrogen thrusters just as gravity vanished.
Three hours passed before the main engine came roaring to life. Delagarza saw the amazing blue torch shooting out of the shuttle’s tail, in complete silence, while they soared through the vacuum into the white expanse of Dione.
“You don’t do this often, do you?” the pilot asked him at one point.
“What gave it away?” Delagarza asked.
“Your face. Looks like my kid’s during the holidays.”
At the co-pilot seat, Krieger snickered.
“Laugh if you want,” Delagarza told her, “where we’re going, you’ll be the fish out of water. By the way, no obvious enforcer weaponry, please, or there won’t be no one around to sell me the ‘ware I’m going to need.”
Krieger shot him a dubious glare. She looked like a trout to Strauze’s shark. Small, tight mouth, oily black pupils, tufts of black hair insinuating themselves under her helmet.
“I’m not telling you to go unarmed,” Delagarza said, “but consider bringing plastic, okay?”
The woman shrugged and Delagarza allowed himself to relax a bit. He dreaded already what being seen next to an enforcer would do to his reputation.
Re-entry was jumpy, but he expected it to be. Years upon years of movie dramas had given the entirety of the Edge’s population a pretty good idea of the forces involved during a standard atmospheric entry. He knew the fireball that surrounded the shuttle would love to slither inside the cabin and burn the ever-living shit out of him, and it would do so at the slightest chance.
Not a reassuring fact in a ship built by people who thought you could hide an atomic reaction by trying to make the hull look like a race car’s chassis.
Still, the shuttle didn’t explode, and the fireball disappeared to leave Delagarza with a computer-rendered sight of Dione from outside Alwinter’s dome.
It wasn’t a breathtaking sight. But it was impressive. Dione was covered in white, its surface swatted at by a titanic snowstorm that had roared non-stop for a million years. Life was utterly impossible outside a dome, except for brief excursions with environmental suits. Machinery handled all the heavy-duty ice mining.
Delagarza knew they were close to Alwinter, but there was no sight of the dome on screen, nor of the colossal mining equipment that littered the city’s surroundings.
Just white. Everywhere.
Delagarza shivered and looked away from the screens.
They reached the landing pad, visible only through the computer’s promises that it was there. The pilot maneuvered the craft until an extendable airlock made contact with the cabin.
“That’s all on my part,” said the pilot, “call me in a couple days and I’ll come pick you up,” he told Krieger.
“Just make sure they don’t leave without me,” she said.
She and Delagarza reached Alwinter through a series of semi-deserted maintenance tunnels and shafts. That Krieger had the authority to walk unimpeded through the entrails of Alwinter’s labyrinthine life-support system reminded Delagarza of the woman’s sheer reach. The hatches they walked through had red lines painted in their frames with a symbol everyone in the city knew by memory. It meant that anyone caught in this place without the proper credentials faced lifetime in prison.
A couple of security drones and a pair of guards gave Delagarza the stink-eye when their wristbands and sensors marked him as someone who very much lacked the proper credentials, but they looked away at once when they scanned Krieger’s.
Delagarza only relaxed after passing the last hatch and being buffeted by Alwinter’s freezing breeze. The faint hum of the industrial ventilators felt like coming home.
“Where to, now?” Krieger asked.
“Off to sleep, of course,” Delagarza said, glancing at his wristband. Dione had a year-long day-night cycle that Alwinter didn’t bother to follow. Its artificial day lasted ten hours, same as its artificial night. Between going up to Outlander in the morning, being interviewed by Strauze, and coming down again, the city was about to call it a day.
“We hired you to work over the clock,” said Krieger, “don’t waste enforcer’s time.”
“Listen, lady,” Delagarza said, “I don’t mind pulling extra hours, but going into Taiga Town at night is stupid. Haven’t you seen the soap operas?”
Krieger’s eyes narrowed. Taiga Town was a startown that had long ago moved from its cozy section of Outlander into the colony below. Like all startowns across the Edge, its reputation had been romanticized and exaggerated by movies and shows, but most of it was well-earned.
“Very well,” she said, “tomorrow at first hour.”
She glanced around at the naked, stout buildings ordered in neat rows next to the traffic-filled street.
“Know any good places to sleep around here?”
“My apartment has great reviews,” Delagarza joked, giving her a meaningful smirk. “You can stay there for the night, if you want.”
True, he didn’t particularly like Krieger, but Alwinter’s nights were best spent with someone to help you keep the sheets warm. Even if that person was an enforcer.
At first, Krieger winced, like she smelled something nasty under her nose. Then, she shivered, and seemed to reach Delagarza’s conclusion.
“Ah, what the hell,” she said with a shrug.
NEXT MORNING, at first hour, Delagarza and Krieger met with Cooke at the GPS spot Delagarza had marked in their wristbands.
“Sweet Reiner,” Cooke said when he caught sight of Delagarza, “you look like hell, Delagarza. How long have you been without sleep?”
“Ain’t you a perceptive fellow,” Delagarza snapped back, without animosity.
Last night’s romp with Krieger had gone as well as anyone could’ve guessed. It was like sleeping with a judgmental coworker who commented caustically on your performance the entire time. Afterward, Delagarza had consumed two day’s worth of water rations in a long, hot shower.
“We’re here,” Krieger said, looking around, like Taiga Town would materialize in front of their noses, “but I don’t see this startown you mentioned.”
“Not yet,” Delagarza said. He gestured at her and Cooke to huddle together, close to him.
They looked like three grizzly bears with the amount of cold protection they wore over their reg-suits (Cooke had rented one at Delagarza’s insistence). Warm, yes, but also impractical for movement in a city where all empty space was a luxury.
“You’ll need to wear these,” Delagarza said, handing each of them a pair of poly-plastic beans the size of a fingernail.
“What are these?” Cooke asked, as he examined the soft surface of the beans.