reMix

Chapter Four Sour Times

Lars tracked LizAlec from the Arrivals Hall out to the Edge and then topside as the kidnappers buggied out for fifteen miles over the dust wastes of a small sea. The kidnappers had gone topside, Lars had gone under, running the disused service tunnels between Planetside and Fracture. Some habits were too hard to break.

To get to Planetside’s Edge, he jumped a mail drone when it wasn’t looking, dropping down onto it from a tunnel above. The delivery drone hadn’t liked that. In fact, its opening response had been, “Get off my back now or I’ll fry your balls.” Which wasn’t an idle threat. All mail delivery drones had zap capabilities to discourage pilferers. But, in the end, Lars had argued it into submission. Though from the ease with which the drone gave up, Lars got the feeling it was glad of the company.

But that was way back. Now he was tubed in with the Big Black all around him, trying to ignore the cold and the lack of oxygen. By pressing his back against one side of the shaft and keeping his legs pushed out straight, Lars could move up the steep bore-hole without too much effort. It didn’t matter that a thin line of monofilament dropped away into the vacuum below — the weight of Ben’s ice bucket wasn’t enough to upset his balance. Luna gravity was a sixth of that on Earth — not that Lars knew what standard gravity felt like, or ever would.

He’d been conceived, podded and brought up on the moon and it showed in his bones, in the onset of incipient osteoporosis, in the brittleness of their matrices and the pronounced lack of calcium. Lars looked fat-faced because his endocrine system was fucked over by the lack of light, gravity and basic health care. His muscles too were undeveloped by earth standards, but pot-belly or not Lars could still move more gracefully than any tourist. As for climbing, he wasn’t Ratboy for nothing. No vent was too steep, no optix tunnel too cold, dark or low to keep him out.

All the same, he hated working beyond the Edge. It was off-code as far as Lars was concerned. He was strictly a Planetside creature. It wasn’t just that the off-Edge blackness meant he burnt up precious lightsticks, or even that the fierce cold could strip warmth from a human body as surely as dropping it in liquid nitrogen. It was having to rely on an o/lung.

Even wearing his precious bubble suit, the rough-hewn wall was sharp against his back, where it pressed against black Kevlar mesh. So sharp, Lars felt sure it would snag. But that didn’t make him anxious. What scared him shitless, was the thought of getting his o/lung caught against an outcrop of rock in the darkness, ripping it out of his side to leave a gaping hole.

Sandrats only had one lung. To keep things simple, most sandrats were born with a right lung only, on the left the cavity space was hollow. It was a standard week five foetal modification, carried out when the gecko-sized embryo was still pretty plastic in biotek terms. Partly it was a straight DNA rewrite, but mostly it was microsurgery. You couldn’t put the blood/oxygen exchange in until after the birth, though.

Getting him lunged-up at birth was about the only good thing his Ma had done for Lars. Sure it was a primitive model, thrift-store cheap, a basic oxygen/CO2 swap that took its top-up straight from a metal o/lung strapped to Lars’s left side, but it worked and that meant Lars could roam the airless, lifeless mail tunnels that most lowlives avoided. That was the basis of being a good scavenger, getting to places others couldn’t reach.

It meant he could stash stuff too, well away from the WeGuard goons and LunaWorld security. And it let Lars drop out of sight every time the heat got too much: but it also meant Lars went through any vacuum with a bottle strapped to his side, ever-present, vulnerable. Ready for a rip-out.

Lars didn’t know anyone that had happened to. Come to that, Lars wasn’t sure anyone knew someone it had happened too, but it got talked about all the time in the simBars out on the Edge. It was one of those Cheshire-cat memes. It came, it went... and then it came back again. A half-decent memetecist would have had a field day.

“Ten metres, maybe twenty...” Lars was talking to himself again. It might be an unknown tunnel to Lars — hell, even he didn’t usually travel this far out — but there was an opening somewhere above him. An entry into Fracture. He could feel it. A shape of silence in the static of his head. There was a real difference in shapes between being in air and running a vacuum. A vacuum felt more internal, like fuzz, less firm. With air, Lars got definite shapes inside his head. Without air, it was just a gut feeling.

Just how hearing objects worked Lars didn’t know, but it did. Pulling on the thin wire, Lars began to haul up Ben’s ice bucket. He didn’t want the monofilament snagging when he crawled over the lip into the branch tunnel up ahead. The bucket came up slowly, the length of monofilament telling Lars how far he’d already climbed. Only what Lars saw first was an orange flicker, like a glowbug rising up through the darkness.

“Shit, Ben,” said Lars, when he spotted the diode’s warning. “I’m sorry, man.” The bucket needed feeding. If Lars didn’t get it power real soon that diode was going to turn to red, and after that to black. It had never got to black before, ever — though it got to red once, when the whole of Planetside’s power grid went down and the authorities cut the ring feed on the Edge to concentrate on keeping the tourists warm and safe. And the diode had got to orange a couple of times before, too...

Lars sighed. Okay, more than a couple of times, but it wasn’t because he was careless, it was just... Splicing into a feed when you were an illegal took stealth, skill or brawn and sometimes Lars was just running too much on empty to make the trade.

“So what do I do now?” Lars asked. But enough of Ben wasn’t there to answer, so Lars answered himself.

“Go in after them, of course...” What other option was there? She had expensive clothes, which meant she was rich. She’d had her own bodyguard, even if he was a crap WeGuard. That meant she was richer still. All his life he had been waiting to meet someone like this, someone who could help him if he helped her.

Ben needed a new body for a start. And — postcards or not — Planetside had a contract out on Lars. Lars didn’t really understand that part of it, but Ben had been certain Lars couldn’t just go back to being good, even if Lars wanted to, which he didn’t.

“Got to ‘fess up and pay the man,” was the way Ben told it. Lars didn’t see how this was an incentive to be good. But he hadn’t told Ben that. Ben was the clever one, except he’d got dead and that hadn’t been too clever.

Clambering over the lip, Lars pulled Ben’s head up behind him and balanced the ice bucket on the nearest ledge. The new tunnel was narrow and lined with polycrete. Big signs said something in a language he didn’t understand. There were even strands of rotting fibre optic strung along its walls, unscavenged.

Lars could feel them up ahead. Three of them. Not that he’d have known the number if he hadn’t first felt them back in Planetside where there was air. But then they’d gone for the surface, out towards Fracture, after cracking the security code on a triple airlock. But they’d reached the airlock in a vehicle of sorts, a NASA buggy, and Lars had been able to sense three of them up to then. He’d been riding the chattering mail drone, only stopping his tracking to assure it that yes, he was interested and no, he wasn’t bored.

They were near the old US Base at Placid now. Rubble and cracked concrete was all that was left on the surface these days, but once upon a time that rubble had been the US Endeavour deep-space observatory until a Chinese combat shuttle flipped its circuits, ripping the concrete roof open like popping the top off a can of beer. Forty died, maybe fifty... Lars didn’t bother with the figures, it was back in his granddad’s time and Lars wasn’t big on history.

These days Placid was an official US war grave, off limits to anyone without a permit. Though the number of fat Midwestern combat freaks who were granted a permit was staggering. Usually they turned up in Planetside Arrivals kitted out with real paper maps and those grey military-grade Rom-Readers, dressed up in black jumpsuits with eagle flashes. All equipped to relive a war that lasted three days and started by accident.

“Shitheads”: Lars hated them worst of all. They hung around the Edge where they weren’t wanted, trying to bum lifts out to Placid and talking flashpoint tactics for a battle they’d never been at. And, worst of all, started fights they couldn’t finish when no one wanted to give them free rides.

But that wasn’t who this lot were. No, these were professionals, at least the two men were. Like muscle for hire but slicker and richer; better armed too. They were the kind who could afford to do six weeks on, six months off, so their muscles didn’t waste. Not Luna-born, but definitely lowGee trained.

The third person was the girl. The pretty one with the strange clothes. Lars wasn’t sure how a straight grab like that could be personal, but in the room up ahead the two men had been giving her too hard a time for it to be pure commerce. If the words “pure” and “commerce” weren’t too big a contradiction.

She swore — they hit her, so she swore again. That had been the pattern right the way down the first tunnel until they hit the airlock. Then she really went ape, until her screams were slapped into silence. Maybe she thought they’d been about to do a half-black on her.

It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened to a good-looking tourist, not that prospective customers got to see that in the brochures. You could cabbage anyone if you did it right, loss them out, pull them back. Working body, empty head — it made for cheap spares or cheaper sex if you weren’t fussy about emotional feedback. But that wasn’t what this was about: Lars had already agreed with himself on that.

No one pulled a rich kid out of a line at Planetside just to cabbage her as soon as they hit the Edge. She was being taken out to Placid for a reason. Lars just couldn’t work out what it was, but he would... Lars settled down in the tunnel, pushed his ear hard against a cold block of polycrete, squashing his balloon-suit helmet out of shape, and flicked channels in his head, looking for images.

He could wait.