THE DOOR’S lock had been tampered with. That was what clued Clarke in. The sensor that was supposed to read his wristband’s signal was fried and had frozen on the OPEN option.
Clarke’s hair stood on its end, and it took him a great effort of will not to look around at the corners of the corridor, which would’ve put the invaders on alert.
In a sense, it could be anyone inside his apartment, he reasoned. He wasn’t so delusional as to deny that he was a bit paranoid about IA, and it wouldn’t be the first time in his life he made a mistake like that. Once, he had thought a couple of burglars were IA grunts, and had almost gone to jail while he tried to fight them off.
Anyone could have tampered with his lock. It could be the kids he had just fought off not an hour ago, it could be a thief (not that he had anything worth stealing), it could even be his ex-wife, looking for reconciliation in her batshit insane way.
The thought made him chuckle.
His hand hovered in front of the door for a second before he cursed loudly and pretended to talk to himself:
“Shit, forgot to buy milk.”
He cursed again for good measure and turned around, trying his best to look pissed off and not like running for his life.
They let him get half a block out of the complex before a black shadow materialized behind him and ordered him to stop right there.
“You have a badge?” Clarke asked the fellow, a man in a black suit.
“Yes. Here it is,” the man said, producing a gun out of his jacket. A real one, metal and heavy, with bullets capable of turning Clarke’s torso into an art project.
Clarke’s eyes went wide. Firearms were heavily controlled in Metro City, given the ease with which they could puncture a hole in the city’s dome and compromise the atmosphere of a couple million citizens.
Since the man in front of him had one, he either was IA or he was a big-league criminal. Both options left Clarke with little wiggle room.
But those few options he was bouncing around in his head dissipated when a second man appeared behind Clarke and held a sonic baton in front of Clarke’s left ear.
Clarke collapsed to the ground like an android out of batteries. He watched, immobile, how the man calmly placed the baton away and grabbed a tiny square of plastic out of the inside of his jacket’s wrist.
Sub-dermal knock-out, Clarke guessed, as the man loomed over him. Clarke didn’t feel the patch’s effects, he simply blacked out.
3
CHAPTER THREE
DELAGARZA
Oryza may be the blood of the Edge, but water is the oil of any self-respecting star system. Split water into its basic components, oxygen and hydrogen, and you have a great propellant for intra-system spaceships. It’s also useful as life-support, but that’s merely a trifle in a corporation’s balance sheet.
Planet Dione’s surface was covered almost entirely in ice, and it had a sixth of Earth’s gravity. Plentiful water and reduced fuel requirements for orbital entry made Dione quite attractive to investors. Due to this and its positioning in the Edge (far from Jagal and close to the Backwater Systems), its orbital starport—Outlander Station—was one of the richest private enterprises of the Edge.
Outlander’s income came from the thousands of corporate-sponsored freighters that operated among the Backwater Systems colonies in contracts that lasted two years, and who used the starport for refueling, repairs, and occasional brokerage services.
The starport serviced ten thousand ships on an average cycle. If one were to climb Dione’s highest mountain on a clear night, Outlander would appear as a bloated coin of light when compared to the starry sky around it. The static population of the station dwarfed its temporary population by several zeroes.
Managers, technicians, security personnel, engineers, dockers, medical staff, and many more personnel, all with their own families. About forty years ago, the population of the starport had reached critical mass, and the heads of Outlander’s sub-contracted administration had decided it was cheaper to invest in a planet-based colony than to continue expanding the gargantuan life-support necessities of the starport.
A couple generations later, Colony DHS001 had become a city of its own, home to a million people, few of them directly related to Outlander. Alwinter City, as the colony was known, possessed a booming economy, a young and energetic demographic, and crime statistics that would make Victorian-era London hide its head in shame—right in a pile of dead chimney boys.
As it was famously written in the sailors’ Net boards: “Alwinter! Don’t talk to me about Alwinter. You’ll freeze your balls, right before someone cuts them off and sells them back to you. The food’s good, though, all soaked in butter. You can spend a voyage’s pay in food, booze, and whores, just save something for buying your balls back when you leave.”
It took a very specific kind of personality to live in Alwinter, and not only survive, but thrive.
Sam Delagarza had never committed a crime in his life. He was also the kind of man who believed that technically correct worked just as well as absolutely correct.
He exhaled a long, spicy waft of cigarette smoke and watched how the gray trail rose toward the clinical-white dome of the city before curving in the direction of some invisible air recycling unit.
Next to him, his apprentice shivered, despite being covered in several layers of synthetic fur and electric warmers. Delagarza couldn’t help himself, he chuckled at the sight, almost choking with his cigarette.
“What’s so funny?” the young man asked Delagarza, eyes half-closed. Cold made him taciturn.
Delagarza chuckled again, and said, “Told you the reg-suits were worth the price.”
“The fucking brochure said a coat was good enough. That life-support got rid of the cold.”
“Brochures say lots of nice things, that’s how we get a steady supply of fresh meat into Dione. Yeah, the LS are supposed to keep us nice and warm, and they do, when they’re all working as they should. Which is never. It only takes one or two to fail for cold like today’s. I have seen worse, and I’ve only lived here for a couple years.”
He had seen drone collectors lifting men and women frozen solid on the streets, like Christmas statues of very bad taste.
Compared to Cooke, Delagarza was almost naked. He was wearing a reg-suit, a black-coverall made of a smart plastic synth-thread, a couple meters of plumping, a pair of ventilators, and a motor. The reg-suit was a distant cousin of an environmental suit, only thinner. It had a small battery pack and heat-regulator systems spread invisibly all over Delagarza’s body, with a classy hood for his head. The hood was lined with a mirror-like panels that reflected a warm orange light around Delagarza’s head, but forced him (and everyone else) to wear special sunglasses to compensate.
Thanks to generations of engineering, Delagarza only felt a pleasant mid-summer breeze instead of a brutal cold.
The battery presented a constant expense, though, since it had to be replaced weekly.
It was a simple math analysis. Cost of reg-suit plus battery packs, compared to cost of nano-gel injections or hospital bills, was an obvious choice. He had no idea why people—mostly tourists and newcomers—chose to go with other options.
Cooke shivered again, and before Delagarza could make fun of him, he said, “Are you sure this is a good idea? These people are dangerous.”
“Everyone’s dangerous to someone,” Delagarza shrugged. “Even you, Cooke. Lotti and her gangers are dangerous, but not to us. At least, not today.”
After all, it was business. Another simple analysis. The amount of cash Lotti could make by stealing the spare credits that Delagarza and Cooke stored in their wristbands was less than what Lotti could make by hiring them.
Cooke looked unconvinced, glancing nervously at the sparsely populated corridor they were in. The glancing marked him as a newcomer, which was more dangerous in Alwinter than dealing with a ganger like Lotti.