part0020

I left Erkennen’s protégé, but not until I’d heard that lock cycle. Bekah Franklin was a living, breathing dead man’s switch. If she died, so went the Company.

That weighed on my mind a bit, so I took a walk. I do some of my best thinking when my feet are moving and my mouth isn’t. I didn’t really have anyone ’cept my contract to talk to, and she’d be counting sheep soon. My only other options were a handful of geeks who spoke English but in a different language, and Bruno Richter, who preferred one-word grunts from Hunland to real conversation.

Well, that was just fine with me. Maybe it was professional competition or maybe it was his killing style—indirect, with poison—but every time Bruno Richter breathed, he rubbed me the wrong way.

I walked and thought and found myself comparing Richter to Daisy Brace. He came up short in every way. I chalked that up to my reaction to his reaction to my being on his turf. Defensive, offended, jealous. Something . But if Gregor Erkennen thought Richter could handle the job of keeping Franklin safe, he’d never have brought me here, right? I was playing nursemaid to his Number One Man. That had to curdle the milk in Bruno’s cornflakes. The looks he gave me were one trigger finger short of homicide.

I took my time, my steps clicking and clacking along Level 3’s lifeless corridor. They were the only sound around. I cocked an ear at the tiny apartments the crew would have occupied were they still in residence. Every single one was silent as the grave. Hell, the doors, labeled for their occupants who’d moved moonside, even reminded me of tombstones.

My joints had begun to ache, the left knee particularly. The air felt heavy in my lungs, like the cold of space was seeping through the walls. So the heat, like the lights, had been set to minimal function, part of Gregor’s distraction strategy. Plenty warm to ward off a need for a winter coat, but not warm enough for my old bones. If we’d been back on Earth, I could pretty much guarantee a thunderstorm was coming.

I favored the knee a bit as I slow-walked the habitat level. The light in the section I’d just left blinked out. The one in front flickered alive. Masada Station was big. Not as big as Adriana Rabh’s ornamented headquarters belt-buckling Callisto’s ring, mind you, but it felt bigger—the absence of the living will do that to a place. I’d counted thirty or so doors since I’d left Rebekah Franklin. Thirty or so vacant quarters, half the station’s complement.

Masada Station was more rigid in its design than Rabh’s HQ too, more clinical, which made sense given the tech-types that built it. I literally doffed my hat to Erkennen as I walked. He’d achieved something by dressing up Prometheus Colony as the actual prize. He’d managed to fool Cassie Kisaan sitting in her iron throne on Earth. Imagine how much data he’d had to fake to do that. Apartment assignments. Food shipment deliveries going back years. The absence records for staff kiddos, sick from school on a given day. And all just to make it seem like the brain trust’s heavy lifting happened on the moon below instead of this li’l ole asteroid outpost.

Ah, here we were: my destination. I pushed the door chime. The beepity-beep of an unlock code answered a second later, and the door slid open. Richter’s bony frame looked bonier in a wife-beater T-shirt and gray trousers, suspenders hanging around his legs. His face was impassive and ice cold. Looking at it made my knee flare up.

“Your shift to watch over the Geek Patrol, Bruno,” I said. I tried to sound friendly, though not too hard. We all have our pride.

“Where is Bekah?” he asked, each syllable like a jackboot on a street.

“In her quarters. Locked up tight.”

“Gut ,” he said in glottal-stop German, beckoning with his hand. “I’m getting dressed. Come in, Fischer.”

Richter backed away. I stepped into the doorway so it wouldn’t close, but I didn’t go in. Always get the lay of the land before you offer your back to it. There was a light on in the small bathroom. He headed for it.

His quarters were dimly lit like the rest of the station, but I got the impression they were that way all the time. A window looked out to the stars, or would have if it hadn’t been blacked out by Erkennen’s camouflage protocol. Otherwise, Richter’s quarters were about what you’d expect. Clueless bachelor styling—and if you don’t know any clueless bachelors, that means no style at all. A well-stocked liquor cabinet. The handful of mid-sized glass cases across the small apartment caught my eye. Bruno had a hobby.

I stepped in. The door closed behind me.

A faint, musty, musky odor crawled up my nose. It seemed to leave a slick backtrail in my olfactory factory the more I breathed it. It was an earthy scent. More like Earthy—I hadn’t smelled anything like it since I’d been on Ye Olde Home World. It smelled like wild fur that hadn’t been dunked in a river in a while.

“Want a drink?” Bruno called from the bathroom.

“I’m good,” I said.

I could see his face in the mirror, his eyes cocked at me on the angle. His face was wet, but he was shaving without cream. It’s what men who have something to prove to themselves do instead of the smart thing—namely, using cream. There was a dragging scrape as the old straight razor decapitated the hairs from his jawline. I began cataloging potential weapons in the apartment as I stepped closer to the glass cases, my curiosity getting the better of me. Close up I saw they were actually aquariums. Empty of water, but the bottoms lined with rocks. Fake flora under solar lamplights. In one corner of each there was a box up top with a fat, hollow tube hanging into the tank.

I peered closely. There was a small, rolling thump inside. Something squeaked.

“Say, what’s in here anyway? Pet rocks?”

Hungry pet rocks? A mouse emerged from the tube, dropping from the small box up top. Its nose twitched left and right. Its tiny, black eyes opened wide. I don’t think dropping into an aquarium full of rocks had been on its tiny to-do list today.

Something moved under the rocks. I took a half step back and bumped into Richter. He’s quiet, he is, when he isn’t shaving.

“Like them?” he asked.

I put a little distance between me and Richter’s pal-o’-mine smile. He held the razor in his right hand. Half his face was smooth as a baby’s bottom. So, the razor was plenty sharp then. Good to know.

“What, the rocks? Or the mouse?”

I bent my right hand about thirty degrees, out of his eye line. Instinct on my part. Just verifying my springblade was tucked tight where it ought to be, in its launcher under my wrist.

Bruno held his smile and brushed past me. He lifted the aquarium’s lid, reached in, and picked up the mouse by its tail. It squirmed and squeaked.

“Nein, neither,” he said, dangling the mouse above the rocks. They shifted again, and a scaly head emerged. Grayish-brown, a body followed the tail, uncoiling. It kept coming, shedding the rocks like a second skin. It must have been two feet long, though most of it stayed hidden beneath the rocks. The snake’s eyes didn’t leave the mouse. The little bugger’s struggles became frantic. Bruno dangled it like a hypnotist’s watch.

“Black mamba,” he said, dropping the mouse. “Very dangerous.”

Bleating its terror, the mouse ran for the tube. The snake was faster. It struck, vise-gripping its jaws around its prey. The mouse’s feet pumped, hoping for purchase. The mamba dropped it, and the mouse scrambled for the tube again. Watching it was like watching gravity being turned up in the tank. The closer the mouse got to the tube, the slower its movements became. The snake struck again. This time, the mouse froze. After the mamba dropped it, the mouse twitched on the rocks, the snake’s venom flooding its system.

“Beautiful, isn’t she? A perfect killing machine,” Bruno explained, not looking at me. It was a good show in the tank. “She will not eat until the prey is fully paralyzed.”

“You can’t be too careful.”

The mouse had quit struggling. Its whiskers stopped twitching.

“That is true.” Abruptly, Bruno stood up and offered me his hand. He’d moved the razor first, I noticed. “I owe you an apology, Fischer.”

“Okay.” My hand came up on its own and accepted the handshake. I set my body weight on my back foot as we shook, ready for him to pull me in and start slicing with the razor. Old trick.

But that didn’t happen.

“Gregor brought you here,” he said, pumping my hand. “I took it personally. But he’s the boss, yes? And what, eh, the Geek Patrol as you call them—what they’re doing is too important to risk. I get that now. We work together, yes? We keep Bekah Franklin and the others safe.”

“Okay,” I said amiably. What I was thinking was how Bruno Richter would make a first-class undertaker with that thin, ghoulish grin of his. For a man who hardly used words, Richter had just unpacked a suitcase full. “I appreciate that.”

Maybe it was the snake beginning to devour the mouse, or maybe it was that, when Bruno dropped my hand, he left his sweaty DNA mixing with mine. But something about the thin man’s little speech sounded rehearsed. Maybe he’d wanted to make a good impression and actually had rehearsed it. And if he’d wanted to kill me, he’d had ample opportunity and a sharp straight razor to do it. Yet, here I stood, unmolested save for a slightly sweaty palm.

“I will finish getting dressed,” he said. He patted the tank on his way to finishing his shave. The front half of the mouse was on its way to an acid bath in the black mamba’s gut. The smug-looking snake was enjoying its dinner.

“All right,” I said. “I think I’ll walk around the station a bit more.”

Fuck you, screaming knee.

One last look at the show in the tank. Only the hind end of the mouse was visible now. Its tail lay limp while the mamba gulped another gullet full. I wondered what it felt like to be eaten alive, paralyzed and aware. Does the stomach acid burn when you get there? How long could you live while the enzymes broke you down? Would you feel your skin as it disintegrated? Or would you hopefully, mercifully suffocate first?

Richter’s eyes found mine in the mirror’s angle again. As he brought the razor up to finish guillotining, he jerked his head up in a manly, half salute between colleagues. Then flashed his toothy, mortician’s smile.

Made me wonder if his victims died paralyzed and aware too.

With Richter’s penchant for murder by poison still on my mind, I took the lift to the station’s second level. That’s where all the fun stuff is. A promenade of small shops, shuttered and deserted, of course. A bar patterned after a German bierhaus, likely my new best friend’s second home. Then there was the fitness section. Jesus, they even had an Olympic-sized swimming pool! Gregor took care of his people, made sure they had the good life. I knew without looking too closely there’d also be an upscale brothel or two somewhere on the promenade. Gregor knew how to keep his geeks happy and loyal.

Grunting—a loud sound of human effort in the otherwise silence.

Someone was working hard at something next door to the pool. I walked along and found a small sign that read Gymnasium . Inside, the guy named Tripp sat at a machine trying to add more muscle to his girlish figure. I’d noticed him arguing with Franklin on more than one occasion. He seemed harmless, but so do rocks until a snake crawls out from under them.

I walked up behind him, quiet as a mouse.

“How’s it going?” I said.

The weights dropped with a loud, metallic clang . It boomed around the deserted gym.

“Oh, hey,” he said, like his mom had just walked in and the bedcovers weren’t high enough to hide the sin. There was a sign on the wall telling weightlifters to be careful with the equipment. Maybe that was the source of his sheepish look. Tripp hopped off the machine and grabbed a towel to wipe his face. His hair was plastered down. He’d been there a while.

“Nervous about something?” I said. He looked it.

“What? No. You just surprised me is all.” He must have really wanted to clean up, cuz his towel got a lot wetter pretty fast. He mopped his arm pits. It took a few passes to do the job. I’d gotten close enough to smell the sharp, sour scent of sweat coming off him. Tripp smelled like fear.

“It’s okay if you’re nervous,” I said, and meant it. “Times are sketchy. Nervous is fear’s way of keeping you on your toes.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Figured you were headed for bed when we all left the War Room.”

Tripp walked to a rack and stretched the towel over it to dry. He made sure its two halves hung symmetrically over the metal bar, each side the length of the other.

Geeks are like that. Meticulous. Anal.

“I always work out before bedtime,” he said as he eyed the towel. He sounded more impressed with his efforts than I was. A hot, sharp sting of pain arced randomly across my knee. I told it to fuck off again.

“That’s a healthy thing,” I said. “I guess.”

“Think I’m gonna turn in myself,” I said. “Long night.”

“Yeah, okay.” Tripp walked past me. “This whole thing—it’s just one long night, isn’t it?”

Since it sounded rhetorical, I let the question go. We took the lift together back up to the Habitat Level. The towel absorbed Tripp’s sweat but left that sour scent, wafting up from his underarms. It reminded me of the feral smell in Richter’s quarters.