The Hidden War Read online

  So, with Brana relaxing the hack she’d run on him, Krim told Sam to give him back what he’d worn with the Naturals, short beard and hair hanging down to his neck in dreadlocks. Nurel had her blue hair again, just a puffy corona around her head. Even Brana grudgingly let her hair grow out into blazing red locks barely an inch long. They all wore the silver spacer hide, but in a duller sheen, so that they looked like battered crew from a beat-up freighter, and not pilots on their way to the front. Even Steem and Makk wore their hides in silver, though they still looked every bit as menacing, despite the way they wore their hair loose and long.

  The shore party moved toward Payday in a shuttle, one of the Poddies, Krim noted, but a larger version for passengers, not fighting. Makk piloted it naked, jacked in direct without a slate. The shuttle had viewscreens at the bow and stern, and Krim took a console by the starboard screen, just behind Makk.

  He’d seen enough rock colonies in his days. The usual convention in carving out a colony from a planetoid had been to leave the surface intact, with maybe a docking crater and a beacon to show that the innards had been gutted for habitation. The Jack had even disguised its docking crater, part of the Beat strategy to avoid capture. Payday, though, had been stripped clean on the surface, every crater filled with a smelter, any protrusion scraped flat and ground up for ore. It had started, Krim recalled, as an almost pure nickel-iron planetoid a hundred klicks long and seventy-five wide, but that had been in its prime.

  As the shuttle came down over Payday’s horizon, the fission cells on the dark side loomed up. A row of radiating fins shot up from the surface, narrow canyons ringing the out-system side. The cores themselves had to be below the surface, Krim thought—not even the Paydayers would be stupid enough to expose the fission plant to micrometeorites. Moving down closer he could see pipes running around the fins, to recover some of the heat, he thought, but they generated so much power it was remarkable that they had to shed some of it into the ice sink of space.

  Moving over the sun side of the planetoid, they passed by the smelters and crushers. Catcher tugs moved back and forth, tagging stray rocks and slamming them down into huge pits with crushers that ground the ore up. A haze of debris floated over the entire surface, dust and fines that got drawn into the planetoid’s feeble gravity. Makk had to steer up and around to avoid a nasty cloud of particles, but even then Krim saw sparks flame against the hull of the shuttle as some dust hit their repulsor shields.

  Finally, they came down to the main docking bay, a flat crater ringed by scrap ships: shuttles, in-system cruisers, planetoid tugs, even some old Ameruss destroyers like the Kirkpatrick. Payday did a lot of business as a chop-shop, shredding stolen ships into ore. “To light out for Payday” used to mean “to grab a ship and steal it,” Krim thought, but he also heard Payday did a good business in bounty hunting, too. If a stolen ship wasn’t worth much more than scrap, and would cost too much to send back to its rightful owner, Payday would either impress the thieves into indentured service, or bond them back to the authorities.

  Makk brought the shuttle down into the bowl, dead center on a landing cross, and then a transfer tube moved out from the crater rim, and they were docked. “Look lively, pilots,” Brana said as the tubeway hatch opened. “You’re dealing with the scum of the system here.”

  A waft of foul air rolled into the shuttle, and they stepped back at the blast. Krim smelled the air briefly—the sour egg smell of sulfur, a tinge of acrid ozone—and then his hide blocked out the smell and filtered the bad air from his system. A woman with short, greasy blond hair met them. He squinted at her, trying to figure out why she seemed so different, and then realized not only did she wear a ragged jumpsuit, but that her skin was pocked with scars, and that there didn’t seem to be that telltale glow around her from the hide.

  No, not a glow, he thought. An absence of clean skin, unmarred skin. Even the Naturals, who shunned adornment, had no scars, no deformities. She didn’t have a hide.

  “Welcome to Payday,” the blond woman said. “My name’s Sherl. The Paymistress is waitin’ for ya in her office. Come with me.”

  They walked down long corridors, Sam adjusting Krim’s steps to the lower gravity. Brana had told him about that—that the hide and the slate could cause enough tension in the muscles to make it seem as though it were normal gravity. “Only mass doesn’t understand that,” she had warned him, “so don’t think a body of bungee cords can override physics.”

  Payday’s corridors had the look of an industrial plant, Krim realized, like the lower levels of the Jack. No steel or even plastic had been wasted to hide the tubes and wiring that ran the length of the corridors. As they moved farther in, toward the living corridors, he was surprised to see that the walls still hadn’t been covered. Who could live with that?

  Sherl led them down another corridor and into a five-meter-wide room with a port—no, video, Krim decided; it would be madness to have quarters so close to the surface. An immensely muscled woman sat at a wood—wood!—desk below the video screen. She looked away from them, her face hidden by jet-black hair that fell down to her shoulders.

  “The Paymistress herself,” Sherl announced. “Yer honor, the negotiating team from the Kirkpatrick.” The Paymistress turned to them, flipping her hair over her shoulder, pushing it off her face. Parted straight down the middle, the left side of her skull had been shaved clean, the swirling maze of lines tattooed on her scalp glowing in the dim light.

  “Brana,” the lieutenant said, moving forward to take the Paymistress’s outstretched right hand. “My crew—Makk, Steem, Vuko, Nurel, and, uh, Krim.”

  The Paymistress shook each of their hands, in that old medieval gesture. As she almost crunched Krim’s right hand—he could feel the hide stiffening as she squeezed—the Paymistress looked down at his ring, up at him, and then down again. Krim noticed her own ring, like his on her middle finger. He couldn’t quite make out the logo, but he recognized the style. A Beat—a real one, she had to be, just as Brana had said there might be. The Paymistress was bound to someone, and he wondered if, like his mate, hers had vanished with the Jack.

  “I know you?” she asked.

  “Krim,” he said, “from the Screaming Angel.” He stared at her face, searching for some clue. She had become so impossibly bulked out, every muscle built up, that he could not have recognized her even if she had been Corso, his bond mate. No Beat had ever been so artificially endowed.

  “Brigid,” she said, “of the Ecstatic Cosmos. I know all the Beats out-system. How come I haven’t seen you before?”

  Brana glanced over at him, and Krim caught her gaze, but didn’t acknowledge it. “This is my first time out. The Alliance just released me from prison back on Earth.”

  “Just released? Brother, there’s been an amnesty out for ten years.”

  Krim shrugged. “I was a special case.” He looked at Brana, and she nodded. “Since I was the last one captured, they wanted to make an example of me.”

  “The last?” Brigid leaned closer, until her face was almost in his. He could see her skin, saw that she had no marks on it, and that it was clean like someone who wore the hide. “Were you there when the Ameruss destroyed the Jack?” She glared over at Brana. “When the Kirkpatrick destroyed the home?”

  Krim nodded. How could he tell her? Of course he couldn’t, not even what he had come to doubt himself. “I saw the home go.”

  “They say—some say—that the Jack wasn’t destroyed, that it went . . . beyond.” Brigid waved her hand toward the videoscreen. “Is that true? Did you see it destroyed?”

  “I saw . . . debris,” he said. “I don’t really know. They say it was.” He looked away from her. “I was too busy trying to save my ass to actually notice.”

  “Yeah,” Brigid said. “Well, I was just wondering. You hear rumors. And sometimes we get ore with the Jack’s molecular signature. We’re savin’ it up to make a new one.” Brigid laughed. She moved behind her massive desk, and then motioned for the
m to sit on the spindly plastic chairs before her. “The past is past. Let’s do business.”

  Sherl moved around the desk to stand next to Brigid. Even sitting, Brigid was as tall as the blonde. The shorter woman reached into a pocket of her jumpsuit and pulled out a tubular-shaped object. Brigid opened a small wooden box on her desk, took out a brown object as long as her fingers, bit off the end of it, and held it before Sherl. Sherl snapped something on the tube, and a flame shot up.

  Krim and Brana and the others jumped up from their chairs in the spacer’s instinctive reaction to flame. Flame in spaceship atmosphere was not good; it meant fire and explosions in the higher concentration of oxygen. Brigid laughed, then sucked on the long object until its end caught fire, but nothing else did.

  Holy Moloch, Krim realized then, they have earth-spec atmosphere in here, too low a mixture for a planetoid. He wondered what their blood levels would be, and then realized why Sherl panted so much leading them in. And Brigid smoked. She sucked on that object—a cigar, he realized—straining the scrubbers and putting who-knew-what crap into her lungs. She blew the smoke toward them, and he smelled it briefly—acrid, harsh, but with a faint pleasing odor—before the hide filtered it out. Brigid’s hide would filter it out, too, he realized, except for the taste. Wasteful, he thought, and then realized: that was the point. The muscles, the oak desk, the atmosphere, the cigar—it was all to show her wealth.

  Brigid pushed the box toward them. “Cigar? They’re Ceres-grown, out of Cuban stock. Very fine. It’s an annoying habit I’ve picked up. Plays hell with the hide, but what the heck, huh?”

  None of them touched the box. Brigid blew more smoke their way, and Krim could see Makk and Steem shifting nervously as they stood to either side of the shore party. “We’re here to take on a load of steel. What’s our take this run?” Brana asked.

  “We’ll have to sample the ore coming our way.”

  “We downloaded the analysis, and you should have received the samples a day ago.”

  “Our equipment hasn’t been running right,” Brigid said. “Though I’m sure your analysis is correct.”

  “Well, you’re paying for the last batch we threw at you anyway.”

  “True. But I like to make sure you’re maintaining your standards.”

  “We deliver. The Kirkpatrick doesn’t blow crap.”

  “Of course, of course, but something—or someone—is draining a lot of the good ore out-system. Why is that? I wonder why. I don’t like the way the market goes. I get complaints. Our smelters can hardly keep up with the demand, and Payday’s running behind schedule. It would be nice to have better quality ore. And I wonder how you can blow it our way in such nice little bundles. That’s good shooting with your tugs. What kind of tugs you driving these days?”

  “You ask a lot of questions,” Brana said.

  “Something’s going on out-system. You bring a Beat along.” She glared at Krim. “Beats belong here, they know that. Why’s this guy going out-system?”

  “I want to go out-system,” Krim said.

  “Let her answer it,” Brigid said.

  “He wants to go out-system.”

  “Like she said.” Krim stood up, leaned toward Brigid. “Are you questioning the right of a brother to do what he wants to do?”

  “No, of course not.” Brigid waved at Krim’s chair. “Relax, Krim. No offense.”

  “None taken.” Krim sat back down. He looked over at Brana, and nodded at her. “I’ve heard rumors about the Jack, that it wasn’t destroyed. I heard that it might have gone out-system, that they might have come up with a new kind of drive, that when the Kirkpatrick blew her up, she didn’t really blow, that she went, I don’t know, someplace else.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that, too,” Brigid said.

  “Out-system,” Krim went on. “Maybe out toward the Oort, or the Kuiper belt. The Jack would be a rock among millions of rocks. If home’s out there . . . well, I have to see.” He paused, took a breath, and continued the lie. “And I figure, it’s the Kirkpatrick that I joined on, the old hulk the Alliance scrapped and Brana’s bosses converted to a freighter. Might be some karma in that—might be that the Kirkpatrick will lead me back to the Jack, okay?”

  “Okay.” Brigid smiled at him, her cheek muscles rippling so that it almost looked as if she grimaced. “Okay. It still seems damn strange. I thought I could get some answers in trade.”

  “We just deliver steel,” Brana said. “That’s it. Passengers and steel. I don’t question what gets done with it out there at the edge. You know there’s always black stuff going on, spook stuff. For what, I don’t know—the Alliance doesn’t fight wars anymore. Who would they fight? I don’t question it, and I don’t think you should either. Even if I had the answers, I wouldn’t tell you. One load of steel isn’t worth losing the route. You know that.”

  “I know.” Brigid stood. “Forget I asked. I’ll give my terms to Krim here. You wait outside.”

  The party stood. Brana glanced at Krim as he waited by Brigid’s desk. “You going to be okay?”

  “I’ll holler if she tries to break my back.” He smiled at Brigid to show he didn’t think she would do that.

  “Sure. Five minutes, though—you got that, Brigid?”

  “Right.” Brigid waited for them to leave, then motioned at the chair again.

  “I’ll stand for now,” Krim said.

  “Okay.” She sat, puffed on her cigar again. “Okay, here’s the terms. We’ll give you one hundred kilotons of steel. Jack knows what you’ll do with it, but that’s not my business.”

  “I’ll tell ’em.”

  “Uh, one more thing. You see Sherl here?” Krim nodded. “Sherl has a little problem. Lots of people here on Payday have a little problem.”

  “No hide.”

  “Yeah. Well, not much left. We get a lot of radiation from the power plants, and there’s not a lot of shielding left on Payday, either. Plus, our slates just can’t crunch numbers like some of these in-system jobs. All of that degrades the hide. Sherl and most everyone else here is running on internal hide, just basic maintenance for food and meds.”

  “You seem to be doing all right.”

  “Yeah, well, rank has its privileges, you understand?”

  “It might make it easier on everyone if you didn’t smoke. I bet your air’s screwed.”

  “The scrubbers have been challenged.” She ground out her cigar. “It’s a nasty addiction.”

  “Payday’s falling apart,” Krim said. It clicked into place. Few planetoid colonies could sustain themselves forever without a steady infusion of organics, or water. “You’ve slimed your nest.”

  “We’ve got some ice coming in. That ought to help. And some hydrocarbons from a scoop through Jupiter, if it makes it. But we need something now, or I start putting my crew in suspension. If I do that, the smelters go down, and if the smelters go down, I’ve got a swarm of ore that starts slamming into things I’d rather not get slammed.” Brigid picked up the cigar butt, made sure the end had gone out, set it back down. “We need some new hide stock, as much as you can spare. A new generation, some starter. What we’ve got—it’s just fried. We can grow more, but we need a new batch.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I wouldn’t ask for it if I didn’t need it.”

  More hide? Krim thought. What could be the problem? From what he’d seen, from what he knew, the stuff was hardly anything. It should be no problem. “I’ll tell Brana your terms.”

  Brigid shook his hand again, gentler this time. “Thanks.” Krim turned, stood by the hatch as Sherl began to open it for him. “Krim?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Look, you can stay here—jump ship, if you want. Beats belong with Beats.”

  Krim looked at her, nodded. “I thought of that. How many surviving Beats out here, do you think?”

  “A hundred, maybe. Mostly zeks like you, or those like me who had been elsewhere in the Belt and went underground after the Jack got hit. Har
d to say—lots of us still haven’t emerged. You could stay on Payday, or I could get you passage to some other rock.”

  “The Beat I’m looking for can’t be here, though. I have to try to find her.” Krim thought of the Hidden War beyond, of flying. That too. There’d be spacing in the Belt, but not flying. He was a pilot. Pilots flew. “I’ve got to go out there, look for the Jack . . . look for Corso. Thanks, though.”

  “Sure,” Brigid said. “Worth a shot, you know?” She rubbed her ring, looked down at Krim. “If you find the Jack, let me know, okay? I’ll spread the word. Just let me know.” Brigid turned the ring around on her finger, a gesture Krim knew all too well. “I had a mate on the Jack, you understand.”

  “We all did,” he whispered, then looked straight at her. “I understand,” he said, and went back to the others.

  “No way,” Admiral Thom said when Krim laid out Brigid’s terms. After they had returned to the Kirkpatrick, Krim had gone up with Brana to Thom’s quarters.

  “The steel shipment seems fair enough,” Brana said.

  Thom shook his head. “That’s not it. It’s the hide. We can’t deliver hide to these . . .” He looked at Krim, then away. “These Rockers.”

  “Why not?” Krim asked. “You didn’t see Sherl. She was in a bad way.”

  “Yeah, well, life’s rough in the Belt. They know that. There’s always a backhaul in-system if they want a safe, happy life on Earth.”

  “You want the Belt to collapse,” Krim said.

  Thom shook his head. “No, not anymore. Once, you could have said that. Now, we don’t care.”

  “You care about their steel.”

  “A business transaction. We can take it or leave it.”

  Brana glanced away, then looked back at them. Krim knew that gaze: she was checking her slate. “We’ll have to leave the steel here if they don’t start delivery in two hours.”