Belt Three

JOHN AYLIFF

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015

Copyright © John Ayliff 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015. Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

John Ayliff asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.

Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-811357-5

Version: 2015-05-15

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Chapter One

The ship was a spindly two-ring clipper, tacking against orbit as it dropped sunward through the main shipping lanes of Belt Three. Jonas magnified the image to fill the bridge screen, so that the insect-like body of the clipper stood out against the golden plane of its sail. The ship was battered, asymmetrical, its grav-rings and spine lost beneath a crust of repairs. There was a marking on the side of its cargo bay, a feathered spiral of white on blue, presumably the logo of some minor shipping company. Apart from its heading, it looked like any of the other ageing tramp freighters that plied the orbits of the inhabited belts.

‘Ayla, is that course reading correct?’ Jonas asked.

The pilot jumped in her seat. ‘What was that, sir?’

Ayla often became so lost in her connection with the ship that she stopped paying attention to her physical surroundings, but she normally hid it better than that. Jonas made a mental note to give her some time off when they reached port. The stress of the evacuation was getting to all of them.

‘That ship,’ Jonas said, indicating the screen. ‘It looks like it’s heading for our rock. Can you get its transponder data?’

Ayla’s eyes defocused for a moment as she checked the Coriolis Dancer’s sensors. ‘Yes, sir, the course reading is correct. It’s the Remembrance of Clouds, a private trader registered out of New Calais.’

Jonas frowned. ‘Clouds? Odd name for a ship.’

Ayla consulted her implant again. ‘That’s not its original name. The transponder has been hacked. With more time I could tell what the original name was.’

‘No, don’t worry about it,’ Jonas said. A hacked transponder was a warning sign, but if the ship really was heading into a Worldbreaker Red Zone, time was the last thing it had.

He looked back to the local belt chart. His abandoned uranium mining outpost, LN-411, was a day’s orbit behind the Dancer, deep inside the conical Red Zone that marked the probable course of the Worldbreaker. Warning glyphs flagged that the rock was forty-five hours from Black Line. The trajectories of dozens of ships traced curved lines across the screen, abandoning rocks in the Red Zone and fleeing towards distant cities.

There were the usual couple of Scriber Immolation ships heading back into the Red Zone, cheap eggshells filled with suicidal cultists on their final pilgrimage. Jonas stabbed a control to filter them out of the image. With the Scribers gone, the only ship moving into the Red Zone was the Remembrance of Clouds.

Something was wrong here, and if it might affect the Dancer’s safety then Jonas wanted to know what it was sooner rather than later.

‘Hail the Remembrance of Clouds.’ Ayla spoke quietly into the air, letting her implant pick up the words. ‘Remembrance of Clouds, this is the Reinhardt Industries mining hauler Coriolis Dancer. Please acknowledge.’

A woman’s face appeared on the screen immediately, as if she had been waiting for the hail. She looked perhaps thirty, square-jawed, with a mass of unkempt blonde hair and a web of pale scars across one side of her face like an impact crack on glass. Jonas could make out a blue-and-white circular symbol behind her, the same one that he had seen on the side of her ship. She looked at him with an unfriendly smirk, not speaking.

He ignored the woman’s expression and put on a business-like smile. ‘This is Captain Gabriel Reinhardt on the Reinhardt Industries mining hauler Coriolis Dancer.’

‘Captain Keldra ’82-Pandora, Remembrance of Clouds.’ Her voice had the coarse accent of a Belt Three tank-born.

‘Captain Keldra, it looks like you’re heading for the LN-411 asteroid. Are you aware that rock is in a Worldbreaker Red Zone? All the mining stations have been evacuated, so if you’re going there to trade…’ Jonas left the sentence hanging. The woman’s smile was unnerving, and she had shown no surprise at the mention of the Worldbreaker.

‘I’m not heading for LN-411 right now,’ Keldra said. The transmission shut off.

Ayla swivelled in her seat to face Jonas, looking on the verge of panic. ‘Captain, the ship’s altering course. They’re not heading for LN-411. It looks like…’

‘They’re heading for us,’ said Jonas.

‘Yes.’

He cursed under his breath. ‘Pirates.’

Ayla’s eyes widened. ‘Pirates?’

‘Full burn. Evasive manoeuvres.’

Ayla closed her eyes for a moment, and Jonas felt the deep rumble and the shift in gravity as the hauler’s ponderous engines fired.

‘I can try, but we’re overloaded, and there’s nowhere to run to, even if we went deeper into the Red Zone,’ she said.

‘No, stay out of the Red Zone.’

Ayla nodded, relieved. She was no Scriber. Even with pirates bearing down, no normal person would willingly head into the path of a Worldbreaker.

Jonas swung out of his chair and headed for the door. ‘You have the bridge. I’ll be back soon.’

From the outside, the Coriolis Dancer resembled a fat metal mushroom. A single grav-ring ran around the outside of a domed cargo bay, with the fuel tank and chemical reaction drive protruding below the bay like a stalk. Jonas kept the grav-ring spun up at a quarter gee to match the home gravity of most of the miners. Normally on a homeward run the cargo bay would be packed with canisters of uranium to sell at the nearest city, but today it was crammed with the mining and hab equipment they’d salvaged from their hurried evacuation of LN-411, with their last haul of uranium nestling forlornly in the centre.

Jonas’s two dozen mining servitors stood in a row along the ring’s orbital corridor. He tried not to meet their blank stares as he ran past. As Gabriel had, Jonas made sure only to use legal servitors – condemned criminals, or tank-borns who had been unable to pay off their cloning debt – but he knew there was a thriving black market in the mind-wiped victims of pirate raids. That would be how Ayla and the rest of his crew would end up if the Remembrance caught them, and Jonas as well, if Keldra learned his secret.

Most of the free-willed personnel were crammed into the crew lounge, almost the only room on the ship not filled with hastily rescued mining equipment. There were six Worker-caste mining supervisors, and a couple of Engineer-caste members of the Dancer’s regular crew. They looked up from game pads as Jonas opened the door. He found Matton, the huge red-bearded mining foreman, and gestured for him to come out into the corridor.

Matton waited until they were in the corridor and the door was shut before he spoke. ‘We felt the engines fire.’

‘Ayla’s putting us on an evasive course,’ Jonas said. ‘Pirates.’

Matton had worked for years to build up his physical strength, but he still moved with the grace of someone who’d been raised in quarter gravity. Now he closed his eyes for a moment and took a breath, and Jonas could tell he was suppressing an urge to punch something.

‘Damn scavengers, picking us off at a time like this. Well, we had a good run while it lasted. Do you know what to do?’

‘I want you to jettison the cargo. Empty the bay.’

Matton sighed. ‘You know that’s not what I meant.’

‘It might make us light enough to outrun them.’

‘Wouldn’t work. What kind of ship is it?’

‘It’s a two-ring clipper. Salamander class, I think.’

‘No, it wouldn’t work. The Salamander has some of the best engines outside of a Solar Authority cruiser. If they’re looking to rob us they’ll be flying with an empty cargo bay. We don’t have the acceleration to evade them.’

‘It’s still worth a try. What if we strip out everything non-essential? Empty the grav-ring. We just need engines and life support.’

‘That would take hours. The pirates would be on us before we were done.’

Jonas frantically tried to think. ‘We’ve got a servitor combat programme, haven’t we?’

‘A basic one, yes, but we’ve no weapons. The servitors couldn’t repel a pirate boarding party.’

‘No, of course not, but they could be a diversion. If we tie the pirates up in a fight, the rest of us can escape in the shuttle, and if we jettison some junk at the same time then they might not notice us.’

Matton shook his head. ‘They would notice us, and we’d be lucky if they stopped to pick us up rather than shooting us out of space. Sir, you’ve got to surrender. Pirates don’t hurt true-borns. They’ll ransom you to your family – that’s how it works. You can’t save us, but you can save yourself.’

‘I’ve got to try something. Give me a programming spike.’

Matton drew the device from the pocket of his overalls and handed it to Jonas. ‘It’s up to you, sir, but it’s a bad idea. I should get back in there and tell the men what’s happening.’

‘Tell them I’ll get them out of this,’ Jonas said. ‘I don’t just want to ransom myself. I’ll find a way to save all of us.’

‘Sir, you can’t, so don’t try. I’m not going to go in there and give those people false hope.’

‘Matton—’

‘Sir, you’re more important than us,’ Matton said gently. ‘We’re just tank-borns. Clones. You’re a true-born. Look for a way to save yourself.’

‘You know I don’t think I’m better than you.’

‘Don’t let the men hear you say that.’ Matton put his hand on the lounge door, and then paused. ‘It’s been an honour working with you, sir.’

Jonas nodded sadly. ‘And for me.’

He went up to the nearest servitor and raised the programming spike to the back of its neck, then lowered it again. Matton was right: a straightforward fight would be no good, even as a diversion. He had to think of something else.

When Jonas got back to the bridge, the Remembrance of Clouds had furled its sail into a bud and was firing up its reaction drive. Ayla had put the Dancer on course for a cluster of small rocks where they might be able to hide, but the pirate ship was closing too quickly. The pilot looked up from her concentration as he entered.

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘How long?’

‘Just a couple of minutes.’

Without the glare of reflected sunlight from the sail, the Dancer’s scope was able to resolve more details on the Remembrance of Clouds. Some of what Jonas had taken to be repair jobs were actually weapons: he could see dozens of small missile turrets sprouting all over the ship, and something larger, like a launch tube made of industrial piping, built into the nose complex.

His mining outpost on LN-411 had deterred pirates using surface-mounted cannons, but most of the cities with which he traded did not allow armed civilian vessels to approach them, so the Coriolis Dancer itself was unarmed. Normally, the Dancer would only travel to a city when the orbits brought it and LN-411 close enough for it to cross without danger, or when it could join a convoy with an armed escort ship. But a Worldbreaker evacuation meant a breakdown in the normal routine of inter-city commerce. At any time there were hundreds of Worldbreakers starward of the veil. When one of them passed through an inhabited section of one of the belts, the Red Zone of its probable course became thick with unarmed ships making long spins to whatever unthreatened outposts they could reach: rich pickings for any pirate ships nearby. Worldbreakers and pirates both struck rarely enough that true-born ship owners accepted the risk; and since pirates would normally ransom true-borns back to their families, the risk to them was purely financial. It was Jonas and his crew’s bad luck that this pirate had focused on them.

‘Hail them again,’ Jonas said.

Ayla put the call through. ‘They’re not responding.’

‘Keep trying.’

He sat back in his control chair and tried to form an image of Keldra in his mind. She had no reason to keep him waiting. It was possible she was tied up by some unrelated task, but more likely she was deliberately keeping him waiting, he decided. Perhaps she liked the feeling of power.

‘Are we sure they’re pirates?’ asked Ayla hopefully. ‘That symbol they’re using…I thought pirates used skulls.’

‘They usually do.’ Jonas pulled up a magnified image of the logo on the pirate ship’s cargo bay. The spiral was only the skeleton of a more complex pattern: the blue circle was criss-crossed with white streaks and swirls, looking irregular and feather-edged as if they had been hand-painted. He stared for a few seconds before he realized what it depicted. ‘Clouds. That’s a picture of the Earth.’

‘Oh,’ Ayla said. ‘I didn’t know what it looked like. I suppose you’d know.’

‘I suppose.’

‘I’m getting a response through now.’

Keldra’s expression was smug and cruel; she knew she had already won. ‘Captain Gabriel Reinhardt. I see your ship’s changed course. I hope your pilot isn’t taking matters into her own hands.’

Jonas made himself smile. ‘Captain Keldra, as you can see, the Worldbreaker has forced us to travel through dangerous territory with no escort. I’m prepared to offer you a substantial fee in exchange for your protection.’

‘I’m not interested in being bought off. I want your cargo and your crew.’

‘There must be some deal we can reach. This doesn’t have to end with my crew mind-wiped.’

Keldra looked at him with disgust. ‘You want to negotiate? Spineless true-born scum, think you can talk your way out of every problem.’

‘They’re locking weapons,’ Ayla said.

‘We have no basis to negotiate,’ Keldra continued. ‘You have nothing I want that won’t be mine in a few moments anyway.’

‘I’ll destroy the ship,’ Jonas said suddenly.

‘What?’ Keldra froze, and fixed Jonas in a piercing gaze.

‘You heard me.’ He had made the threat without thinking, but now he couldn’t take it back. ‘If you try to dock, I’ll overload the reactor.’

‘You won’t,’ Keldra said, but Jonas could tell she wasn’t sure.

‘Ayla!’ he shouted. ‘Remove reactor safeties!’

Shocked, Ayla hesitated, but then she closed her eyes for a few seconds and warning icons appeared all over Jonas’s console.

Keldra seemed to study him for a moment, not quite hiding her uncertainty, then her mouth curled into a wicked smile. ‘So do it. I’m not turning back.’ The transmission shut off.

Ayla turned back to Jonas, her eyes wide with panic. ‘Gabriel, don’t do this.’

The Remembrance of Clouds had matched orbit with the Dancer and was closing in to dock. Jonas’s heart sank; he wasn’t sure he could go through with his threat. ‘I can’t let her turn you and the others into servitors,’ he said.

‘Sir, we’re dead anyway,’ Ayla pleaded. ‘Let her ransom you to your family. You’re the important one. You…you knew what Earth looked like.’

On his console’s lidar display, the Remembrance of Clouds was drawing alongside. Jonas’s finger hovered above the control that would overload the reactor, but he found himself unable to press it. Ayla was right: she and the crew were dead, one way or another. Gabriel wouldn’t have wanted Jonas to die like this. There had to be a way out.

He couldn’t beat the ship, but perhaps he could beat the person. He knew Keldra was emotional; he was sure that her anger had been genuine and not an act. She seemed to have enjoyed gloating, so he knew she was cruel. Perhaps he could use that.

He had an idea. Jonas had years of experience with servitor programming, from his time as an Administrator. Keldra didn’t know that, so she wouldn’t expect him to know some of the tricks he did. The servitor combat programme wouldn’t be any use while the ship was being boarded, but if he could save it for the right moment…

A shudder ran through the ship as the pirate’s docking lines locked on. The pirates would cut through the Dancer’s cargo bay door and enter the ring through the cargo airlock.

He walked over to Ayla’s chair. ‘Ayla, hold still.’

She looked up, startled but obedient. Jonas put a hand on her shoulder and held the programming spike to the back of her neck, just below the base of her skull. Her eyes glazed over as the spike momentarily took control of her pilot implant. He tapped in his Administrator override code and then loaded the combat programme into the implant’s free space. ‘Prepare to enter dormant mode,’ he said, speaking to the combat programme through Ayla’s ears. ‘Verbal re-activation, my voice, password…’ He searched for a word. ‘Oberon.’

The implant blinked Ayla’s eyes twice, acknowledging its new instructions.

‘Short-term memory wipe. One minute.’ If this was to work, it was better that Ayla didn’t know. ‘Enter dormant mode now.’

She swayed as the implant released control. Jonas kept his hand on her shoulder to steady her.

‘Are you all right?’

‘What happened?’

‘I think you blacked out for a moment.’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

He held the pilot’s gaze. ‘You have nothing to be sorry for.’ He nearly told her that it was his fault, but then stopped himself: she would respond that it wasn’t, and he would be fishing for her forgiveness for what he was about to do. These were her last moments as a free-willed human being and he had no right to make them about him. Instead, he said, ‘you were the best pilot I’ve worked with, and it’s been an honour flying with you.’

There were tears in her eyes, but she managed to smile.

There was a noise outside the door. It sounded like the pirates had reached it, and were preparing to blow the lock. There was no point resisting now. Jonas pressed the door release.

A pirate walked in, a large man dressed in an armoured vacuum suit. A servitor; he walked with a robotic gait, and his face inside the visor was expressionless. He scanned the room with a pistol and then fired quick bursts at Jonas and Ayla.

Jonas’s muscles seized up painfully, rooting him to the spot. A nerve gun, set for paralysis. He could move his eyes and facial muscles a little, but nothing else. The servitor lowered the gun and gave a hand signal to someone in the corridor.

Captain Keldra strode into the room, followed by a second servitor. She was tall, and from the way she was built Jonas guessed she had been raised in at least half gravity, probably more. She wore a yellow armoured vacuum suit, but her helmet was clipped to her belt, leaving her head arrogantly unprotected. She looked around the room critically, then pointed at Ayla.

‘Spike her.’

Jonas could see the helpless panic in Ayla’s eyes as the first servitor produced an enslavement spike and walked up to her. The servitor held the spike to the back of her neck and there was an unpleasant organic sound as it injected a servitor implant. Her eyes moved wildly for a moment, and she twitched, muscle spasms fighting against the paralysis, as the servitor implant systematically destroyed her higher brain functions and installed its own tendrils in their place. The pirate servitor touched her with an anti-paralyzer but she remained motionless, her mind gone.

Keldra pointed at Jonas. ‘Search him for weapons, and cuff him.’

The first servitor kept Jonas covered with a nerve gun while the second patted him down for weapons, put a pair of cuffs on his wrists, and then released him from the paralysis. Keldra watched smugly.

‘Make sure your ransom is worth more than the trouble you give me,’ she said.

Jonas nodded silently. He intended to cause her a great deal of trouble – and she’d be getting no ransom, in any case – but for now he had to bide his time.

Keldra’s nerve gun dug into his back as she marched him around the orbital corridor. Any last-ditch resistance the crew had put up was over, and pirates were already beginning to strip equipment from the walls. The pirates were all servitors; he couldn’t see any free-willed humans among Keldra’s crew.

They passed a group of newly mind-wiped mining foremen putting on vacuum suits in preparation for the transfer to the other ship. Keldra prodded Ayla to join them. Now was the moment. Jonas waited a calculated second, and then rushed forward as dramatically as he could.

‘Ayla! Where are you taking her?’

Keldra grabbed his arm and brought him round to face her. ‘Oh, was she yours?’ she asked. ‘Was she special?’ The cruel smirk was back on her face, as he had hoped. ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure I can find a buyer for a pretty young thing like that.’

She let out a little snorting laugh and undid his cuffs as a servitor pushed a patched and blood-stained vacuum suit into his hands. Jonas kept his eyes on Ayla for as long as he could while he donned the suit, trying to look desperate and dejected. He had to let Keldra think she could use Ayla to hurt him. From the smug look on the pirate’s face, he thought he had succeeded.

They climbed a ladder to the centre of the cargo bay, their weight dropping off until they were in microgravity. Across the gap, the Remembrance of Clouds kept station with the Dancer, its two grav-rings casting spokes of shadow across its cargo bay. The Dancer’s bay was emptying as Keldra’s servitors sent cargo containers along the lines to the pirate ship. She put the cuffs back on Jonas and then clipped them to a personnel transfer line. As it hauled them along, they passed a pair of servitors manoeuvring uranium ore canisters across the gap.

‘You should have fought,’ Keldra said, suddenly.

‘What?’ Jonas said.

She pressed the nerve gun against his back. The shock couldn’t penetrate the vacuum suit, but the pointed tip of the weapon pressed in painfully. ‘You ran,’ she said. ‘You people always run. You should have fought.’

Chapter Two

The prison cell was a converted cargo container a few metres wide. There were three light strips in the ceiling, but only one of them worked, so the room was filled with an eye-straining half-light. A hard-angled metal bed was bolted to the floor, and in the corner was the sealed box of a chemical toilet.

Jonas got up slowly, still nauseous from the nerve gun paralysis, and rubbed his wrists where the cuffs had dug in. He felt heavy: he estimated the ring’s gravity was close to one gee, much more than he would have expected on a pirate ship. There was a little barred window in the cell door, through which he could see a brightly lit corridor and a security camera bolted to the opposite wall. He pressed his face to the bars to see as far as he could into the corridor, but he couldn’t see any guards, or any other sign of life. The only sound was the faint rattle and gurgle of the ship’s systems.

He lay down on the bed. After what he guessed was an hour the vibration changed in tone, and the room seemed to tip sideways as a gentle new acceleration dragged him towards the wall. The Remembrance of Clouds was unfurling its sail and pulling away from whatever it had left of the Coriolis Dancer.

Sometime later he heard footsteps in the corridor. A slot at the bottom of the door opened and a tray of food slid in. He waited, but the footsteps did not depart. When he sat up on the bed he saw a face, dark against the window.

‘You should have fought,’ Keldra said.

He didn’t move. He had expected her to come to gloat, although he hadn’t expected her so soon. He glowered up at the door for a moment but said nothing. He wanted her to be angry at him, and for now the best way to achieve that would be to ignore her.

‘Eat!’ she commanded.

‘What have you done with Ayla?’ he asked.

Keldra let out a snorting laugh. ‘Eat!’

‘If you want obedience, why don’t you spike me?’

‘Don’t tempt me. I bet your family would pay something just for your body.’

Jonas went to the tray and picked it up. Keldra’s face was close to the bars. He examined her, keeping his face controlled.

‘If you spiked me, you’d have no one to talk to,’ he said. ‘We’re the only free-willed people on the ship.’ A subtle movement of her eyes told him he was right.

He sat down and began to eat. It was the tasteless, nutritious slop that servitors were fed. He grimaced, deliberately, as if he were used to only the finest true-born cuisine.

‘You should have fought.’ Keldra banged on the door, making him jump. ‘Look at me!’

He lay the spoon across the bowl and sat up haughtily. ‘You have no right to keep a true-born like this.’

That set her off. ‘You think you’re better than the rest of us. You’re not. You’re just a spoiled ruling class.’

‘You’re just a clone. My ancestors walked on Earth.’

Keldra thumped the door again, making the cell rattle. ‘You know nothing about Earth! I’m closer to Earth than any true-born. I’m a genetic duplicate of someone who lived on Earth.’

‘You’re a clone. What’s your name, clone? Your full name?’

‘To hell with you.’

‘You don’t have a name. You have a serial number. You were made.’

Keldra was leaning close to the bars, as if she were the one locked up. She seemed like a caged animal that might tear the door open at any moment. Making her angry was almost too easy. Had she come down here looking for a shouting match?

‘I’ll tell you my name,’ she said. ‘Keldra 2482-Pandora-33842, Engineer.’

Assuming it was true, that made Keldra 28-years-old. He hadn’t heard of Pandora, but there were a lot of minor Belt Three cities he didn’t know.

‘I am Gabriel Dominic Ellis Reinhardt,’ he said, slowly emphasizing each name. ‘I can trace my family tree back to people named Reinhardt and Ellis who lived on Earth. You have no such continuity. You have a serial number, clone.’

‘You’ve got a past but no future. You’re letting the human race die.’

‘True-borns are the only ones that matter.’

‘You’re letting them win!’ Keldra shouted. ‘In a few hundred years the Worldbreakers will have destroyed everything. There’ll be nowhere for us to live.’

‘There’s nothing we can do. You can’t beat the Worldbreakers. We’re living at the end of the human race.’

Keldra banged on the cell door again. ‘You should have fought!’ She disappeared from the bars and her footsteps echoed away along the corridor.

‘Don’t hurt Ayla!’ Jonas shouted after her. ‘I want her back!’

A few hours later the lights abruptly went off. Jonas lay on the bed and tried to sleep. The cell was cold but stuffy, the air not circulating properly. The faint sound he could hear resolved itself into a dozen different ship systems: rattles, hums, rhythmic thuds, and a trickle of water that sounded as though it came from just beyond the wall. There was a gentle, regular swaying sensation, as if the grav-rings were not quite properly aligned.

He still didn’t know if he had judged Keldra’s personality correctly. She seemed so volatile that he couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t forget about the ransom and slave-spike him in a fit of anger.

Six years ago he’d promised to do something worthwhile with Gabriel Reinhardt’s name. He had set out to prove that he could run a successful business while treating his tank-born employees decently, or at least better than the exploitation that was the norm. Not exactly a grand dream, now he thought about it, but even there he had failed. Gabriel Reinhardt’s uranium-mining business had survived but had not prospered. Jonas had found himself living day-to-day, plans to do more pushed to the back of his mind. Now the double blow of Worldbreaker and pirate had ended even that, his employees were dead, and there was no goal left for him but to escape and survive.

At least he had a chance of doing that. Keldra was volatile, but if he trod carefully his plan should still work. Soon he would be free, and then he could think about what to do next.

Jonas had guessed right. When another tray rattled through the slot the next morning, the face at the bars was the expressionless servitor that had been Ayla. Jonas ran up to the door. Keldra stood behind the servitor, smirking, a nerve gun in her hand.

Servitor-Ayla remained at the door after delivering the tray, giving Jonas a chance to look at her. Her face was bruised, one eye half-closed from the swelling, and he could smell blood from where Keldra had beaten her. He reminded himself that Ayla’s personality had died the moment Keldra had slave-spiked her, so she was no longer suffering, but that didn’t make the bruises any easier to look at. She had been a brilliant young woman with so much potential, but the only place his society had found for her was as a living control system for a mining hauler. Worse, she had accepted that place, humbly buying into the belief that true-borns were her natural superiors and her role was to serve them. Jonas had tried to tell her that he wasn’t better than her, but she hadn’t listened. Now his decisions had led to her personality death and the mutilation of her still-living body. At least it would soon be over and, if his plan worked, she would be avenged.

He leaned close to the bars, and let the emotion he was feeling show on his face. He had to give Keldra this triumph to make her feel secure. He glanced left and right. Keldra and Servitor-Ayla were alone in the corridor.

Keldra let out a little laugh. ‘You know, there are some theories that consciousness survives a mind-wipe. It has no control, but it can perceive what’s happening. Your Ayla could know exactly what I’ve been doing to her.’

Jonas pressed his face against the bars, and whispered.

‘Oberon.’

Servitor-Ayla blinked twice. Her original pilot implant, now running his combat programme, had a deep connection to her brain, and quickly wrested control of her body from the more recent slave implant. He stepped back from the door, and Servitor-Ayla’s eyes followed him. He nodded in Keldra’s direction.

‘Neutralize her.’

Keldra started to react, but not quickly enough. Servitor-Ayla spun around fluidly and landed a kick squarely in her stomach. As Keldra reeled, Servitor-Ayla neatly struck her hand, sending the nerve gun clattering across the corridor. Keldra swung at the servitor, but clumsily. Servitor-Ayla placed one more sharp blow to Keldra’s neck and the pirate collapsed against the wall.

Jonas grinned, triumphant.

‘Get this door open.’

He saw how the door locked when Keldra had put him in: there was nothing electronic, just a big manual lever that released the bolts. The unarmed combat programme should be able to follow his instruction.

Servitor-Ayla ducked out of sight. A second later the door swung open.

Keldra was moving sluggishly, winded but not unconscious. Jonas grabbed the nerve gun from where it had fallen, clicked the slider up to ‘kill’, and levelled it at the pirate. There was no fear in her eyes, only anger, as if she were daring him to kill her.

He closed the trigger and held it closed as Keldra convulsed, muscle spasms making her limbs flail in unnatural directions. He kept the trigger closed until she lay still. She wasn’t breathing. The nerve gun should have stopped her heart.

Jonas felt sick. The hand that held the nerve gun shook uncontrollably, and the corridor seemed to spin around him. He closed his eyes and tried to control his breathing, but when he opened them the body was still there. He should have felt pleasure at having avenged Ayla and the others, and won his chance at freedom, but all he felt were nausea and guilt. He had never killed anyone before, and now he knew he was capable of it.

He looked away from the body and managed to stop shaking and think clearly. He could reassess his moral compass later, once he knew he was safe. He looked up and down the corridor, trying to orient himself with what little he knew of a Salamander’s layout. If he reached the bridge he should be able to take control of the ship and put it on course for a friendly city. The bridge would be in the first grav-ring, and he was fairly sure he was in the second. If he headed around the ring he should come to a transport hub, eventually. He gestured Servitor-Ayla to follow him.

The bulkhead door at the end of the corridor was open. Beyond was a dim storage area, large enough that the far end was hidden behind the grav-ring’s ceiling horizon. The corridor ran between transparent partitions, on the other side of which deactivated servitors knelt in neat rows like Scriber cultists at prayer. Jonas recognized some of them as his mining servitors and the former crew of the Dancer; a few of them wore bruises where they had tried to resist capture. Their down-turned faces were corpse-like in the bluish light.

They were some way along the corridor when Jonas saw movement. A ripple of sharp twitches passed along the rows of servitors as their implants activated them. They began rising to their feet, each making the same smooth, compact movements. Doors in the partitions slid aside.

Jonas looked around in panic. Someone was in control and trying to stop him. He must have read Keldra incorrectly when he had guessed that she was the only free-willed person on the ship. He looked for controls to the partition doors, but none were visible. The servitors were on their feet now. The ends of the corridor were beyond the grav-ring ceiling horizon in both directions, so he didn’t know which end was closest. He broke into a run, towards the far end of the corridor, away from the prison cell.

The partition doors were fully open now. A servitor stepped into his path, massive hands outstretched. He had been a mining servitor, and was still wearing the Reinhardt Industries uniform. Jonas raised the nerve gun and fired. The servitor convulsed and fell, but two more were already stepping out into the corridor behind him. Their movements were uncoordinated: it looked as though they had only a basic non-combat programme. He fired wild bursts along the corridor and shouldered past the servitors as they fell.

The bulkhead door to the next corridor section was in sight now. Jonas kept firing, pushing past bodies, and fighting off clumsy, grasping hands. The door was locked, but there was a manual override behind an emergency panel. He pushed down on the lever, putting all his weight behind it. The door resisted for a moment, then sprang open, revealing a grey corridor mercifully free of servitors.

Servitor-Ayla was a few metres behind Jonas, the combat programme fighting its way through the other servitors easily, delivering swift chops precisely to their nerve points. He fired into the throng, clearing a path for her, until she was in reach, and then grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her through. He shut the door and engaged the emergency hard lock. A minute later there was a series of thuds as the servitors banged ineffectually on the door. He rested his head on the steel wall and paused for a moment, fighting to get his breathing under control.

He had reached the ring’s transit hub. The door to the transit module tube was closed, and lighted icons indicated that the modules were elsewhere in the ship. Whoever was in charge of the servitors would no doubt prevent him from recalling one. His plan for taking control of the ship had already failed. He needed a way out.

Each ring should have its own set of escape shuttles, and they were normally close to the ring’s transit hub. After a few moments Jonas found the door he needed.

The shuttle bay was cramped, with vacuum suit racks and tool lockers running along its walls. In the floor were four circular airlock hatches. Between them, through thick, foggy windows, the coffin-like shapes of the shuttles were visible, clamped in their recesses in the outer hull.

Like the doors, shuttle control had a local override, a fail-safe so that the crew could evacuate in the case of a ship-wide malfunction. There was even a local belt display based on the shuttle bay’s own lidar. At the moment it showed a binary pair of rocks, the smaller of which had a habitation beacon. Jonas grinned. If he could reach that outpost he would be home free.

An intercom on the control board crackled to life.

‘That’s as far as you get, true-born.’ The voice was breathless and uneven, but it was Keldra’s. She sounded as if she was running.

Jonas leaned in to the intercom. ‘How did you survive?’

‘This ship won’t let me die.’

He stabbed the controls to prep one of the shuttles for launch. ‘I’ve got shuttle control. You can’t stop me leaving.’

‘I’ve got fire control. If you launch one of those shuttles I’ll blow it out of space.’

He hesitated. ‘You wouldn’t. You want me alive for ransom.’

‘You think I make empty threats?’

A chime sounded to signal that launch prep was done, and a hatch hissed open. Jonas stared at the cramped, cocoon-like space beyond. With the system running on local override, there was no way to launch a shuttle except from inside it.

Servitor-Ayla was standing behind him, obedient and alert, the combat programme scanning the room for threats to its master. Her face was expressionless; the woman behind it was already dead.

‘Servitor,’ Jonas said slowly, ‘go into that shuttle and use the launch control.’

Servitor-Ayla paused, and, for a moment, Jonas thought that the command to launch a shuttle had been too complex for the combat programme, but then she walked forward and climbed through the hatch. Jonas watched through the floor window as the clamps released and the shuttle fell away from the hull, drifting to one side as the Coriolis effect took it away from the shuttle bay. Ayla was visible momentarily through the tiny filtered window, before the thrusters fired and the shuttle dwindled to a point.

A missile streaked across the window. The shuttle exploded into a million glittering shards.

Jonas punched the side of the control panel in frustration. Now there was nowhere he could run. Involuntarily, he thought back to what Keldra had said about consciousness surviving a mind-wipe. He knew it wasn’t true, but if it was, then letting her destroy Ayla’s body had been the most merciful thing.

The door from the corridor opened. Jonas turned just in time to see Keldra powering across the floor towards him. Before he could move she grabbed his throat and slammed him against the wall.

‘You don’t steal from a thief.’

He wriggled in her grip. She pulled upwards, choking him and nearly lifting him off his feet. A pair of burly servitors entered behind her and trained their nerve guns on him.

‘You don’t steal from a thief,’ she repeated. ‘You steal from a business owner, they have insurance, they have law enforcement. They have their true-born family to help them out. A thief doesn’t have all that.’ Her grip tightened, making his eyes water. ‘You steal from a thief and they’ll hunt you down and kill you as a warning to everyone else, because you don’t steal from a thief. You don’t steal from me.’ She released him and he doubled over, gasping. ‘Why didn’t you wait? I could ransom you to your family. That’s the way this normally goes.’

Jonas lay against the wall, feeling his throat. He could taste blood in his mouth. The game was up; she had already shown she was prepared to kill him rather than let him escape. He might as well tell the truth for once.

‘I’m not a true-born,’ he croaked.

Keldra delivered a swift kick to his ribs. ‘What’s your name, clone?’

‘Jonas 2477-Athens-20219, Administrator.’

She kicked him again, less hard this time. ‘Bastard. I lost a good shuttle because of you.’ She looked down at him, calculating. ‘What happened? How’d you get where you are?’

‘Gabriel Reinhardt was a Scriber. He Immolated six years ago. The Belt Three branch of Reinhardt Industries should have passed to his next of kin, but…’

‘You took over.’ She smiled slyly. Was that admiration Jonas saw on her face, or did she just like the thought of a true-born family being screwed over?

‘I was his personal assistant, so I had access to nearly everything,’ he said. ‘I fired all the staff who knew his face, and rebuilt the business. His family’s up in Belt Four. He didn’t talk to them much, and they never knew he was a Scriber.’

‘But if I ransomed you to them, they’d know you weren’t him. Hah.’ Keldra was still looking thoughtful, as if sizing him up for something. ‘You’d still have been living like that if that Worldbreaker hadn’t shown up. You must hate the Worldbreakers.’

‘Hate the Worldbreakers?’ Jonas looked up, incredulous, trying to work out if she was serious. ‘I hate you, you damn pirate! There’s no point hating the Worldbreakers. They’re just there. There’s nothing we can do about them.’

Keldra grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him to his feet, her eyes flaring with a resurgence of anger. ‘No point. Nothing we can do,’ she mimicked acidly. She thrust his face into the local belt display. ‘Do you know what that rock is?’

The local belt display showed two bodies near the Remembrance of Clouds. One of them was flagged as having a habitation beacon, but the display did not show any more information; the other was dark, visible only as a lidar trace. A pair of rocks orbiting a common centre, one of which was inhabited: any number of outposts in the belts matched that description.

‘What? No. It could be anywhere.’

‘It’s LN-411.’

‘But LN-411’s a lone rock, it doesn’t have…oh God.’ An awful chill ran through his body, quite different from the mundane fear of enslavement by a pirate. The other rock was the Worldbreaker.

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