Callista would usually have slid in through one of the windows of her suite, but the grid of metal bars meant to keep her safe had recently been replaced with a laser variant. The thieves of Atsa City were growing ever more opportunistic after all, their brazenness fuelled by a lack of consequences because the Chippers remained in their stone outpost after sunset. They didn’t do this because they acknowledged that the gangs ruled the nights instead of the governor who had invited them — no, they did it because GLEA refused to pay the medical bills of those who got involved with night-time activities on Yalsa 5. The expense would most likely outstrip the donations that the Agency received from those few grateful followers of the Creator God who lived on the planet.
Callista would rather have eased her way past bars instead of facing the echoing entrance hall that was formed by cold, unfeeling marble. Her keypass lay flat against her palm as the electronic door wheezed shut behind her, throwing out a puff of air which disturbed her dusty hair. It was already flinging around her chin again; she had pulled it back into yet another knot but none of the strands were long enough to stay in that position for more than a Yalsa 5 hour — which, conveniently, wasn’t too far off the length of one Old Earth hour. The days were not dissimilar either so, unlike some other planets that kept to Old Earth time, night here generally tended to fall when it was supposed to.
Callista stopped dead when she realised she wasn’t alone.
It was probably a good thing she’d remembered to stash her weapons under the front porch or she might have shot the two people waiting for her without realising who they were.
Eyes narrowed in defiance, she said, ‘I am twenty-five. Old enough to retire if I was a miner on the asteroids. Old enough to go out and enjoy myself without coming back to this…this interrogation.’
Her parents were standing at the foot of a chipped grand staircase that was in danger of losing its rotted wooden railing. She could understand their desire for the coin-chips to fix it up, but she disliked them expecting her to help fund their lifestyle. As for the money she pocketed at night while working for the Maria, that was hers. Something they couldn’t keep track of. She didn’t touch the bank account they’d given her — not that it had much in it these days — because she preferred to keep her purchases a secret.
‘What have you done?’ her father demanded. ‘See, your mother is so upset.’
‘Isolde Israr asked you to marry him!’ her mother cried, pacing on the first step as though afraid to fall to the floor, where her husband had planted himself.
Callista’s father’s loamy eyes lit with anger. ‘You refused him?’
‘You want me to marry a guy who whinges to you when his guards — no, spies — catch me eating a hamburger when he’s decided I need to be on diet?’ Callista asked, crossing her arms over her chest and causing her jacket, which was quite snug when she sealed it, to strain over the unfortunate assets that had made her the target of a millionaire friend of her parents.
Perhaps ‘friend’ was too generous. Accomplice, perhaps.
She’d had Kick drop her off three blocks from her parents’ house so they wouldn’t know that Isolde hadn’t brought her home. Now she wondered why she’d bothered with the pretence; her parents obviously knew that she’d ditched Isolde at the restaurant. Clearly she would never make them happy unless she chained herself to some guy who wouldn’t find her when she was in trouble and lay healing hands upon her…
‘He’s loaded!’ her mother shrieked.
‘So’re the asteroid miners — and for some reason they got sent a bad reference after I applied so I can’t be one of them,’ Callista said, then shook her head, amazed. ‘I can’t believe I stayed here as long as I did. After tonight, I’m gone. You won’t see me again.’
She slid her finger across the sensor that would automatically unzip her jacket. Her mother gasped when the leather parted, revealing what Callista was wearing beneath it. Callista smiled down at the black tank shirt which was emblazoned with the Maria logo. Hiding her gang affiliation beneath the jacket had been her way of feeling that she could, at any time, escape her parents’ plans for her — not to mention the company of one Isolde Israr whose idea of taking a woman on a date was to abduct her at gunpoint.
Exposing the symbol now was a good way to show her parents what she thought of the tune they wanted her to dance to. She was terrible at dancing anyway. That particular flaw had earned her the ironic gang name ‘Dancer’ barely a month after signing in blood. It was really her parents’ fault for letting her stay out so late, thinking she was looking for a suitor, hoping she’d been with Isolde, praying to any god that would listen that she’d been planning to drop some grandchildren for them.
Tonight Callista had actually spent some time with Isolde. But it hadn’t been her choice.
The man had been waiting outside her parents’ house with a hoverlimo and two heavily armed guards whose purpose probably wasn’t to ward off gangs. No, they’d been there to ensure her compliance.
She’d been willing to play along, in the hopes that she would find out if he had any particular wealth stashed in an unprotected place so the Maria could raid it, but then Isolde had proposed, his mouth heavy not with food (he rarely ate more than a fistful of his plate) but a smug, certain grin. She had given him her answer in the form of kicking him beneath the table and then crawling through a window in the women’s bathroom so that Isolde’s henchmen wouldn’t try to follow her for a few minutes. She still wasn’t sure which had been worse — being trapped beneath his lewd gaze or being pinned under a hail of lasgun bolts barely an hour later.
Callista threw her keypass onto the floor. It skidded away.
‘I could have fixed this starking house with money from the mines,’ Callista ground out. ‘But no, you had to go and tell the Galactic Mining Corp I was something lousy.’
When her application had been rejected by the corporation three years ago, she’d stormed off into the city and embraced Asta’s night-life. The Maria were the best clanspeople she could have run into — they’d been lacking enough people that they’d stayed their lasguns and let her join.
‘You could have just married him — it was easy!’ her mother wailed.
Her father held out his hand, as if that gesture alone could convince Callista to stay.
Callista turned away from them, unable to douse the smile. The Maria didn’t attack their own, so now that she was leaving, the safety her parents had unknowingly enjoyed would go with her.
The smile only grew as she neared the steel door barring her exit. How long would those fancy laser bars last when her parents ran out of the money to power them? She waved a few fingers over the sensor pad, but the door remained stubbornly closed. Above her, the lights dimmed. The mansion’s failing power units were apparently starting to affect basic systems. Callista wasn’t surprised.
‘You can’t leave,’ her father said in his gentle baritone. ‘It’s not safe out there.’
As though to emphasise his point, the floor rocked beneath them, the accompanying explosion sounding much closer than usual. Her father’s mind shivered with fear.
Callista laughed and reached for the emergency door release. ‘I’ll take my chances.’
Ala, the only subofficer in the Maria, would be very disappointed to hear that she could no longer use Callista’s connections to the higher echelon to discover which rich family had what to steal or who had installed what security measures. But Callista wasn’t worried. She contributed to her clan in other ways, whether it be with her lasgun or in the interrogation cells.
Callista heard her mother collapse to the ground with a sob of despair. She glanced over her shoulder. Her father was still standing, fists clenched, fury forcing his blood vessels to pop out.
‘You need to marry and have children,’ he said, his voice increasing in volume. ‘Callista! Please! You have to do this! For me!’
Callista stepped outside. The door closed behind her for the last time.
***
The humming baton swung around, sending sparks along the armour guard that ran the length of her assailant’s neck. Callista offered a sweet smile as she returned the baton to her belt. ‘Not doing your job if anyone can just waltz on in, are you?’
‘Waltz? Good one, Dancer.’ Bock chortled. ‘And anyway, last I checked the palm print scanner was still workin’. No one but Maria can get through that door.’ Noticing that Callista was glancing around the empty atrium of the Maria headquarters, he snapped his fingers in front of her face. ‘Hey! Thought Kick dropped ya off at home or somethin’?’
‘Oh, he tried…’ Callista said with a wink.
Most of the gang was out marauding through the streets, though lately their numbers had thinned because their rivals, the Alcazaar, the ones currently acknowledged to rule the nights as they had the city’s only Clan Leader, had started making examples of anyone who wasn’t giving them enough respect.
If any other gang dared to use the title ‘Clan Leader’ or propped up an influential boss who could be deemed to be an imposter, they were headed for trouble. As a result, most clans did not have strong leadership. The Maria only did so well because they were under the watchful eye of Subofficer Ala. Subofficers were plentiful throughout the city — there were so many of them that all they did was squabble with each other, so no one gained enough power to challenge the Clan Leader. There was a good reason why Ala rarely promoted anyone else to subofficer in her gang.
The realisation that Bock was the only one available to guard the door drove a spike of worry into Callista’s guts. He was a weedy doe-eyed teenager, his face smooth with youth and inexperience. He’d probably have switched to a better nickname if Ala had allowed him to; ‘Bock’ certainly didn’t make him sound terrifying.
‘Ala’s here,’ he said, ducking his head shyly.
‘She’s not going to notice you if you don’t actually speak to her,’ Callista told him.
He sighed. ‘She’s a goddess. How d’ya speak to a goddess?’
‘Well, I seem to manage it on a daily basis,’ Callista told him as she swung past. ‘Just be your charming self, Bock.’
‘Charming self,’ Bock muttered. ‘What a crock of shit.’
Callista killed the smile that would have hurt his feelings. Subofficer Ala was a good twenty years older than him and hardened from a lifetime of trying to push the Maria into glory. Her deep bronze skin was ravaged by fire and shrapnel, Ala’s only reward for keeping the clan in line. She would have been their undisputed Clan Leader had they been allowed to openly declare themselves ruled by one. The Maria had lost that privilege fifty Old Earth years ago.
Ala was holed up in her study, a lasgun in one hand and a whisky in the other. Ice tinkled as the subofficer shot back the contents of her glass. Then she cocked her head to the side, her artificial eye whirring as it regarded Callista with a sharp red pinprick, so unlike the warm honey of her other eye. The dark stubble on her head meant that Ala hadn’t managed to grab the time to shave it down in the past two days.
‘Fifty years of Alcazaar fuckery,’ Ala said and slammed her glass down so hard an ice cube leapt to freedom. She crushed the traitor beneath the pommel of her lasgun. ‘Fifty years. They should’ve done us the courtesy of wiping us out when we lost the right to have a Clan Leader, hey? Save us this slow death.’
‘I don’t suppose this is a good time to mention I was proposed to this evening and then moved out of home?’ Callista asked, reaching for the glass of amber liquid that Ala held out to her.
Ala raised the one dark eyebrow she had left. ‘As your subofficer, that shit is not worth my time. I have a skirmish about to go down in Newheim South. As your friend, do go on. Proposed to, huh? This is the closest you’ve come to poppin’ your cherry ever.’
Callista took one sip of her drink then wheezed. ‘Doubtful, Ala.’
‘It’s unnatural, you being twenty-five and all pure. You do realise most of us get this over and done with by the time we hit sixteen, right?’
Callista fiddled with her hair until the knot holding it back from her face disintegrated. She sighed and tucked the useless elastic tie into her pocket. ‘Believe me, I’d like to have managed that.’
Ala’s eyebrow flattened over her eye. ‘You can sleep with any of the Maria men. You’d just have to ask. You’re pretty. You’re not bad with a lasgun. So what’s the big deal?’
‘It doesn’t mean anything, does it?’ Callista asked, trying not to sound too desperate.
‘What’s this, Cals?’ Ala asked, tapping her lasgun against the corner of her smile. ‘Are you some delicate flower? Just get it over and done with so you won’t be so freaked out about it. Now, I haven’t been with one in a while but men, they like experienced gals, ya kno — oh, stark it.’
Ala’s attention was now fully captured by the techpad on her desk.
‘The skirmish?’ Callista asked, dropping her train of thought — hard. There was no time for her personal problems when lives were at stake.
‘Yep. It’s goin’ nova. We were meant to be taking out Subofficer Ranker, the douchenozzle from the Primus clan, ’cept looks like he got himself more firepower than we bargained for.’
Callista scooted onto the edge of her chair. ‘We had a problem with the Primus tonight. We were supposed to just chase them off our patch, but Matron thought we should follow them into the No-Go Zone.’
‘You didn’t agree with her,’ Ala stated, as though they had all the time in the galaxy to dissect one mission while another was falling to pieces.
Callista swallowed. ‘She was in charge so I didn’t argue. Anyway, no one listens to me, I’m just rich folk.’
‘Don’t have time for your sob story, Cals. Just spit out what you’re thinking.’
‘I think it was another gang, most likely the Alcazaar, that got the Primus to lure us there so they could jump us,’ Callista rushed out.
She expected Ala to accuse her of coming up with a ridiculous theory, but the subofficer was frowning, her one good eye unfocused. Then Ala threw a hand across the table at Callista, almost knocking over her empty glass. ‘I’ve been hearin’ some rumours. Thought the Primus were too proud to be the lackies of the fuckers in charge. But we can’t prove anything so none of the other clans’ll gang up against the Alcazaar with us. Stark it. I can’t send anyone over to Newheim South or I’ll lose Market Street and…fuck. I’ll have to go myself.’
‘No!’ Callista stood. ‘We need you, Ala. They’ll wipe us out for good if they get you. I’ll go with Bock.’
There was a minute pause, much shorter than it took for a databyte to be sent across the Web. ‘Go. Make sure you wear something better’n that.’
Ala indicated Callista’s baton and the outmoded lasgun. As it was so sparse, new equipment was only doled out when absolutely necessary. Callista nodded and headed for the door.
‘Cals?’
She turned.
Ala’s expression was softer than Callista could ever remember it being. ‘Come back alive.’ Then that red eye blazed once more. ‘Can’t lose the best interrogator we’ve ever had, ya know.’