CHAPTER 14

Juarez 7A was, politely speaking, a shithole. Palladium mining wasn’t exactly a pleasant occupation, and even though a lot of the actual digging and refining work was done by machines, people were still required to oversee them. The company that ran the operation, Horvat Heavy Industries, didn’t seem to be too concerned with ensuring their personnel had a pleasant stay: the residence buildings were cold slabs of prefab quickcrete, with all the charm of a drafty prison.

The weather’s not much to write home about either, thought Eli as his shoes squelched in the mud track that passed for a main drag. Gray skies poured a cold, hard rain that made him long for a head-to-toe poncho. But all he’d been able to find in the Cav’s lockers had been a dingy knit hat that he vaguely remembered Kovalic wearing on a mission at some point. There was a stain on it that might have been blood, but also might have been chocolate. He was trying very hard to pretend it was chocolate.

A small settlement had sprung up around the Horvat operations center: some shops and a few eating establishments. Several bars. Enough that Eli found himself wondering about the ratio of inhabitants to watering holes. Even the businesses not devoted to the serving of alcohol seemed to sell it as well.

Give the people what they want, I guess. And apparently what they want is booze, and lots of it.

They’d landed late last night at what passed for the settlement’s spaceport; the dockmaster hadn’t blinked at the hour and professed, after the application of a significant number of their credit chips, that he had been sound asleep and never even seen them.

“Remember,” Taylor had said, before they all bunked in for the night. “Our goal is to keep a low profile. We’ll figure out our next move, and how we can best help Simon, in the morning.”

Eli, perpetually the early riser, had taken it upon himself to make the short walk into the settlement and see what could be had in the way of provisions. They had food on the ship, but there was only so much one could eat in the way of prepackaged rations. Literally: you might tear your teeth out. Kovalic tended to stock the kitchen before a mission, and sometimes even found an opportunity to cook during downtime, but with the Cav in for maintenance all the fresh produce had been offloaded.

So far, though, the pickings on Juarez 7A had been slim.

The mud sucked at his left shoe, leaving it mired in his wake as he stumbled forward and almost face-planted into the street. Hopping backwards, he reclaimed it – much worse for wear – and wrestled it back on again, managing to coat his hands in the process. This is stickier than normal mud, right? He brushed his fingers against his coat, but that just seemed to spread it around.

With a sigh, he made for the most central building on the street, a long low-slung affair that he’d identified as the combination general store and, surprise surprise, bar.

Pushing his way in, he was hit by a blast of warm air that at least dried him off. He stomped his muddy shoes against the floor, little pieces caking off, and tried to stroll as nonchalantly as possible, given that he was leaving brown footprints in his wake. Given the state of the floor, he wasn’t the only culprit.

Bustling the store wasn’t, but it did have the highest concentration of people he’d seen since coming into the settlement. A handful of customers were perusing the shelves, doing their shopping, and four or five had gathered over near what seemed to be the coffee machine. There were even a couple sitting at the long plastiform bar that occupied one half of the room. Eli checked the local time on his sleeve and confirmed his instinct that it was way too early – or too late – to be drinking.

Picking up a wire basket, he started working his way down the aisles, choosing food that, while it might not have been organically grown or freshly picked, was at least not protein and vitamins molded into bar form. A box of cereal there, some flash-dried greens here; he even found a couple jars of tomato sauce that hadn’t yet passed their expiration date.

As he passed by the klatsch around the coffee machine he couldn’t help but overhear snatches of conversation, intermingled with the smell of burnt coffee. Much of it was local slang, no doubt related to the mining operation, but one thread happened to grab the attention of the part of his brain that wasn’t looking at food packages.

“…can’t afford it. But they also can’t afford to not have it,” said one of the locals, a white-bearded man with pale skin and a brass ring through one ear.

“You’re full of it, Berrit,” another chided him. A large woman, with a red scarf wrapped around her neck and welding goggles up on her forehead. “How would you know what the Emperor, in his good name, can or can’t afford?”

“I hear things!” the man insisted.

“Everybody knows the emperor’s not even in charge anymore,” said a woman with dark skin, her black hair streaked with gray. “He might as well be dead. Hell, maybe he is and they’re keeping it to themselves.”

One of the participants threw up their hands, another rolled their eyes.

“You got no proof!” said the woman with the red scarf, her tone indignant.

Illyrican politics. Same as they’ve ever been. Rumors of the emperor’s illness and demise had been circulating for as long as Eli could remember – back even before his academy days – but nothing ever seemed to come of it. Still, he wouldn’t have figured a mining operation out in the middle of nowhere would care much about what was going on back on the Imperium’s homeworld.

“Hey,” said a voice. “You’re new.”

It took a moment for Eli to realize that this was directed at him, and when he looked up, still holding a package of frozen sausages of uncertain provenance, it was to find the entire political debate team staring in his direction.

Eli swallowed. “Uh… yeah. Hi?”

“What do you think?” said Berrit, eyes narrowed.

Eli looked down at the package, then back up at the half-dozen pairs of eyes that had turned in his direction. “I was just buying sausages?” he said uncertainly.

“Come off,” said the woman in the scarf. “If you’re here, you must have heard.”

“Heard what?”

The dark-haired woman interjected. “Keep up, lad. That the crims – sorry, Fiona, the Illyrican Empire, holy be its name – are paying top price for palladium. Even though the Imperial mark is barely worth the plastic it’s printed on and Berrit here claims that they’re up to their ears in debt.”

The palladium sales was news to Eli, much less the idea that he should care at all, but apparently the hottest topic in a town full of palladium miners. The Imperium’s financial situation, on the other hand, he was well aware of – the team had discovered back during the Bayern operation that the Illyricans were essentially broke, though that wasn’t public knowledge and Eli wasn’t about to spread it around. “Well, I mean, that is… huh.”

His opinion clearly disappointed them, with one faint groan even issuing from the back corner. But the dark-haired woman was not to be deterred. “This is the caliber of people we get now. Look, you have to keep up with what’s going on. You can’t just spend all day…” She looked him up and down, taking in every detail and apparently synthesizing it into a conclusion about his occupation, “…sitting in an office behind a terminal.”

“Oh,” said Eli. “No, I’m just passing through.”

“That’s what they all say,” muttered Berrit. “I said that myself back in ’05, and here I am.”

“No, really,” Eli insisted. “I’m a pilot. My ship’s just docked at the spaceport.” He jerked a thumb outside, only belatedly realizing that this was probably oversharing. But what else am I supposed to tell them?

Scarf lady – Fiona, the other woman had called her – frowned. “Ship? You a cargo hauler?”

He could hear Taylor’s voice in his head, reminding him that they didn’t have any legends backing their fake identities… but that also meant that it would be harder to disprove anything they said. Besides, he did his best thinking by the seat of his pants.

“Small loads only,” he said. “We’re an independent shipping company. Paravaci.” He rapidly juggled the sausages into his basket, then stuck out a hand. “Ezekiel Bryce.” He hadn’t picked out the name on the one fake ID he had – and wasn’t sure whether it had been Kovalic or Addy who did – but it wasn’t terrible. He could work with it. Although he wasn’t sure that he really looked like an Ezekiel, but that was simple enough to fix. “Folks call me ‘Easy’, cause, well I’m easy,” he said, injecting a slight drawl into his voice. Well, it’s probably good that Addy isn’t here, because her eyes might have just rolled right out of her head.

The dark-haired woman eyed his hand, then reluctantly shook it. Her grip was warm and dry. “Vi. Dembélé. I’m construction supervisor on the Bravo 2 shaft. Fiona’s a machinist, and Berrit is – what do you do again Berrit, aside from make yourself a pain in my ass?”

“Ha ha,” said the white-haired man sourly. “Don’t listen to her. I’m the surveyor for this whole mudball. They wouldn’t be digging shit without me.”

“And yet we’re still digging shit,” said Vi. “So, Easy, what brings your independent operation to the splendid surroundings of Juarez 7A? Don’t tell me: it was our unparalleled vistas.”

Eli grinned. “Got it in one. They said a picture couldn’t capture them, and they had that right.”

There was a guffaw from somewhere back in the crowd, and in that moment, Eli knew he had them. There was a sensation of being lighter than air, floating above it all as the lies rolled off his tongue and buoyed him upwards. Problem with that is there’s nothing to break your fall. Keep it simple. That last part was, unnervingly enough, in Kovalic’s voice.

“Ah, no, just here to deliver some mail, really. We do a lot of courier work, and the relay system out here can be a bit spotty for sensitive materials.” Remote systems like this one – especially given Juarez 7A’s proximity to a nearby gas giant – often had communications challenges, and couriers were hardly uncommon.

“You got anything for me?” piped up a man from the back of the group. “My husband said he’d send me a care package.”

“It’s been two years, Franz,” said another. “I don’t think he cares anymore.” Chuckles ran through the group, even from Franz, over what was apparently a running joke.

“I’ll have to check,” said Eli. “Right now, just doing a little provisioning.”

Vi glanced into his basket and sniffed. “You’ll be lucky if you find anything that’s not been recycled half a dozen times. We don’t get a lot of fresh groceries out here, but if it’s good food you’re after, then it’s Carina’s place you want. It’s just off the main, a block up. It doesn’t have a name because you can’t miss it. Only place around here worth eating at.” There were murmurs of agreement throughout the crowd.

“Roger that,” said Eli. “Thanks!”

Vi nodded. “Maybe we’ll see you around. Right now, us working stiffs gotta get back to it. Morning shift’s about to start.” As if on cue, a whistle shriek pierced the air.

With an assorted chorus of goodbyes, the group dispersed. Eli was about to put the questionable sausages back on the shelf when he felt an uncomfortable itching sensation between his shoulder blades.

Calmly, he turned towards the front of the store, giving him a clear vantage on the direction from which he’d felt the attention, just in time to catch a man standing up from the bar – tall and gaunt, his features shadowed in a raincoat hood that he’d just pulled over his head – turn and leave.

But Eli noticed two things before he did: first, a pair of sharp brown eyes that quickly darted to him and then just as quickly looked away. Whoever this guy was, Eli had piqued his interest.

The second, and far more worrying, was the holstered slug-thrower slung low on the man’s thigh, beside a gleam on his belt that could have been a badge.

Well, shit. So much for flying under the radar.