Lasertown Blues Page 8

  His smile was not reflected in her cold eyes as they stood, face to face. Governor Franken hesitated. “Stay with me.”

  Surprise warmed him. Before he could answer, she added, “I don’t normally have to ask. Or care to. Maybe it’s your eyes.”

  Jack sensed an escape he hadn’t hoped for. “Would it do me any good?”

  “No.” She shook her head sadly. Her sleek dark brown hair cupped about her face. “I’m trapped here as much as you are, and only meeting the quota will set me free. And I can’t meet the quota with an inadequate labor force.”

  “Then let me see the contract. I want to know who set me up.”

  She shook her head again, halfheartedly. “You won’t see it in there.”

  Jack stepped to the console and monitor. He looked back at her over his shoulder. “Access it for me.”

  With a soft sigh, the governor leaned over and did so, her fingers flying over the keys with an ease that suddenly reminded Jack, achingly, of Amber. It was a memory he didn’t need in his way right now, but she stayed there anyway, clinging determinedly to the edge of his thoughts as the screen filled with the blowup of his contract. He scanned. He knew nothing of the names, labor broker or even the lab that had chilled him down. A brief history was nearly all fabrication except for one item.

  He’d been listed as a veteran.

  Winton. Only Winton would know he was a veteran. It wasn’t listed in his records when he’d been assigned to ranger on Claron. No one was to know of his background when they gave him a new life. It had been easy enough to lose in the electronic transfer of his real history.

  Jack terminated the picture. He stood and found himself very close to the woman. But the temptation had been considerably disturbed by Amber and he found himself changing his plans.

  Franken smiled poignantly. “Last chance. Let me give you some pleasure before I have to give you some pain. I can’t send you back without it. Otherwise, the contractors will think I’m going soft. I can’t let them think they can challenge me or their contracts.”

  He shrugged. “Another time. Anyway,” and he reviewed the landscape of Lasertown, memorizing its weak spots, and then sweeping her with a different kind of look, “the view was worth it.”

  She flushed angrily. She pressed a button on the computer console. “You’ll find that you’ll be paying a very high price for this visit, Mr. Storm. Next time, it will be considerably cheaper and much less nerve-racking to buy a map.” She ground out her smokestick viciously as the door opened. She didn’t look up at her two assistants. “Give Mr. Storm a sample of the tangler for wasting my time,” she ordered.

  Their big hands closed around his arms. Jack shrugged. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” he said, as they lifted him off his feet and removed him from the office.

  Chapter Nine

  Amber clung to the cold prefab sheeting that passed for a wall. She pressed her thin body to it and wished with every nerve she had that she could become invisible. The wall sheeting cooled her… perhaps she’d even pass an infrared scan. She could only pray.

  Tiny beads of sweat rolled up on her brow and for the first time she knew what was meant by a cold sweat. She felt it trickle down over her eyes where the beads clung like iridescent zirconias on her false eyelashes. She sensed, more than heard, the electronic sweep. Dear god, let it pass her by. She’d found all she needed to get to Jack, now, please, let the sensors pass her over.

  No klaxons started. Amber felt confident enough to take a short breath. If she were traveling alone, unburdened, she just might get out of this alive. But she had to go back for Bogie. She might be trailed there and, then again, she might not.

  She didn’t want to die way out here, suns and moons away from Malthen, and equally far away from Jack. She’d been weeks scraping by, looking, listening, spying, accessing forbidden systems and finally found his trail among a shipment of cold storage labor contractors, most of whom had been inducted for near lifetime servitude. As she clung to the prefab corridor and tried to still the wild-bird beating of her heart, she knew that if she were found, she’d be killed.

  Just for knowing what she’d found out.

  The original chiller and shipper had been killed.

  Amber willed herself to wait through another sweep. The minute electronic probes set off her psychic senses like insane alarms, pinging and ponging before they passed on. She took a deep breath. Now was the time to run for it.

  Amber fled.

  Jack struggled to wake. A net of fire seared every nerve in his body and as he lifted his head, he felt as though his neck were broken and once having lifted his head, it would bob forever at the broken end of his body. His skin crawled and he lifted a hand to stare at it. When his eyes finally focused, he stared in disbelief, expecting to see blistered and welted skin.

  He forced his head to stop shaking. He wiggled a few fingers experimentally. Slowly, as if they’d been asleep and then awakened with excruciating pins and needles, a wave of pain began at his fingertips, then receded. Jack was vaguely grateful he’d only nine fingers to assault him instead of ten.

  His hand dropped limply back onto the bunk. He heard a man groaning. Then, the way a drowning man recognizes his own gulping, he realized he was the one sobbing.

  The pain left his right hand. Jack turned his head to look at his hand. Other than a rosy blush to his skin, there was no sign of the torment. His head throbbed. He screwed his eyes shut and tried to remember. He’d been taken out of the office and then to a lab. A chair with restraints. And then a net of webbing was draped over him. Jack felt intensely sick to his stomach and decided he’d remembered enough.

  Governor Franken obviously did not believe in token pain.

  A cocky voice intruded on his memories. “What’s this, mate? Awake enough to groan? And they told us you wouldn’t come round till sometime tomorrow. Hey, I bet you’d like a cup of that cold water. Soothes the nerve fire from the tangler, they tell me.”

  Jack twisted his head in the other direction. Stash squatted on the floor next to his bunk, grinning.

  “You are awake, then. Well, what’d you say? What’ll you give me for a cup of water?”

  His mouth and tongue felt like insulating foam. He worked to get his jaws moving and managed a weak, “Stuff it.”

  Insolence beamed back at him. “Look at that!” Stash dipped out a cup and offered it to Jack anyway. Half of it slipped out thanks to muscles that remained slack no matter how hard he tried to drink, but what he got down cooled the raging fire inside.

  Stash relaxed back into his squat, hands dangling from over his knees. “You know, mate, they say pain’s instructive. Sure taught us a lot. Ain’t none of us willing to fool around with her ladyship, contract or not. No, we’ll beg, borrow or steal our way free, but screw the system. Look what the tangler did to you, and you an innocent man.”

  Jack blinked. “Am I?” he croaked.

  “Course you are. Anyone here can see that. Innocent as a newborn baby.”

  Jack closed his eyes wearily. If newborn babies could, and had, waded through fields of blood and broken bodies. But then, he was a soldier, a weapon. The thought echoed strangely in his mind.

  Stash pulled up the thermal blanket and tucked it under his still wet chin. “They docked you three days’ pay, mate. You might as well go back to sleep an’ enjoy it. Don’t worry. We’ll get you up and suited in time.” Stash lowered his voice. “We welders are gettin’ premium time, what with the Thraks blowin’ away the bulkheads and such on the tunnels. Worth our weight in gold, we are.” And Stash gave a nasty chuckle.

  Thraks, Jack thought, drifting back into a kind of sleep, half on fire and half merely bone weary unto death. God, he hated Thraks.

  *Amber?*

  She woke, quickly, as the tough-edged voice knifed into her consciousness. “Yeah, Bogie?”

  *Find Jack?*

  She allowed herself a tired smile. “Almost. When we get to Wheeling Way Station, we need to t
ransfer. It may take us a while… Wheeling’s tough, but we’ll make it.” She was curled up on top of the immense traveling trunk that held the Flexalink suit. She’d been asleep with the corner pressing into her cheek. The freight bay was cold and Amber shivered.

  *But… find Jack?*

  She scrubbed the back of her hand over her eyes. What made her think Bogie would understand even half of what she said? “Bogie, I found out where he went. And I’m taking you there.”

  *Good.* A pause, then, *Any trouble, Bogie fight for you.*

  Amber laughed soundlessly. She had no doubt he would, if she could manage to suit up. But she knew how Jack wrestled for control endlessly over the berserker spirit that occupied the battle armor. She wouldn’t have a chance. Bogie’d have the way station blown into deep-space debris before she’d learned how to stop him. “Thanks, pal,” she said. “I hope that won’t be necessary.”

  *Fighting is good,* Bogie protested.

  “Only to survive,” Amber soothed him. “Now shut up. I’m trying to sleep.”

  *Oh.* Silence. Then, *What is sleep?*

  “Bogie!”

  *Right.*

  Amber closed her eyes. The freight bay lost its chill only when she slept. When she woke, she’d have to figure out how to steal some food and use the toilet again. Not that they’d do much to her if they found out she was stowing away. No, not much—just jettison her in deepspace with the rest of the garbage. She sighed. She’d gotten this far. She wondered how Jack was doing.

  Stash gave a blissful sigh. “Shift premiums. Like gold, they are. We’ll be out of here in no time. ” He slapped Jack on the back. “And you wear that suit like a glove, mate.”

  Jack grunted in answer.

  His companion sounded affronted. “I show you a golden opportunity and I get ignored.”

  “C’mon, Stash. You make more money from smuggling than you do from welding.”

  “That may be as may be… but if it buys the ticket, what’s the difference? We’re outta here.”

  Jack looked down the long line of tunnels. He’d never get used to them. They blasted out rock and welded the interconnections together like worn casings, segments unfolded in a ceaseless line. Weld and seal, quickly, so the crews behind them could come in and sift through the newly blasted rock. If they were lucky, the demolition crew would find a new vein and work would slow for a while. If they weren’t, the tunnels would have to stretch far out of the way—and if they were absolutely cursed, the Thraks would hit them. And there was always work for the welders.

  The shift car had let them off at their intersection, not far from the barracks. Jack stretched his gaze, trying to rest his eyes from all the close work he’d done during the shift. Muscles bunched across his back as he moved his tired arms. He was dropping weight and muscle, try as he would to stay fit.

  “Well, mate, will you look at that?”

  Jack slowed. There, up against the gray tunnel wall, in a pile of Lasertown rock and ash, a tiny, feathery gray-green plant grew. He bent over it. Even in the sterility of Lasertown, something was still trying to grow. Disinfecters sprayed the inner tunnels twice a day to discourage mold and fungi from growing… but this was a seed, brought in perhaps on the boot of another worker from some other job site planets away, and it had found a way to survive.

  Stash touched the fronds gently with his glove.

  Jack tensed. “Leave it, Stash.”

  “Course, I will, mate. Whattya know.” He straightened and walked off whistling, his intercom staticky with the noise even though he had his helmet popped.

  Jack looked after him. He had little doubt that Stash had recognized the plant and had plans for coming back later, in case it could be cured and used to his advantage. He sighed and set off after his welding partner.

  Tension was thick at the cafeteria. Stash’s air of happiness rankled the other, tired crews. He raised an eyebrow and looked across at Jack. “What’re you going to do on your day off, Jack, my boy?”

  Jack gave him a look and then answered, slowly, “I hadn’t thought about it. Go into the domes, I guess.”

  “Ah. And what about you, Fritzi?”

  The grizzled, big shouldered man in front of Stash, his back bowed as though it were a shield to keep out the New Aussie, grumbled something low.

  Stash says, “What’s that? I didn’t hear you.”

  The big man turned around. “I said,” he rumbled, “that some people didn’t get a day off, thanks to you.”

  Stash’s eyes got big and round. “Thanks to me,” he repeated, as he set his tray down on the auto line and watched it start to fill. “Thanks to me? Is that gratitude, I ask you? Did I give you those vices, Fritzi? No. I simply work my fingers to the bone to keep you satisfied with them. So if you have to put some double time or triple time on my timecards to pay off your debts, don’t blame me, Fritzi.”

  Alfredo Boggs picked up his tray from the front of the line. He glowered down at Stash. “Leave him alone, Stash.”

  Stash lifted his hands in the air and affected an injured look. “Didn’t lay a glove on him.”

  Fritzi growled and turned back in line.

  Jack shrugged off the tension. He looked about and saw Perez. “What’s up?”

  “It’s th’ sleeping sickness. Got another man off second shift.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The olive-skinned man looked at him. “Where you have been? So far out in the tunnels you don’t know what’s going on? Did you ever wonder why we’re all crewed together? Because they don’t want us mingling with the old crew, that’s why.”

  Stash scratched the back of his neck. “They’re all looney, from what I hear.”

  The cable layer shrugged. “Maybe so. All I know is, they do loco things.”

  Jack hadn’t heard much but whispers in the barracks. The hair rose on the back of his neck and he tried to ignore it. “What kind of things?”

  “They walk off.”

  “Walk off?”

  “Without suits or nothin’, man. They just walk off. And they don’t get far, you know what I mean. But they don’t care. I heard the other night one of Bull Quade’s men tried to stop one—and he damn near killed the Sweeper trying to get outside the tunnels.” Perez’ voice dropped to a near reverent hush.

  “Bad drugs.”

  Perez bristled at Stash. “Yeah, man. What I hear is, if it’s bad drugs, they got ‘em from you. But no, that can’t be it. It’s been going on since Lasertown opened up. But the ore is so rich, they can’t leave it alone. Not to mention the rubies.”

  “What is it? Some kind of narcosis from the air maybe?”

  “They’re loco, that’s what it is.”

  “Well, I’m hungry.” Stash reached out, bodily lifted the smaller man from their path and moved him aside. Then Stash headed for the food dispensers.

  Perez made a face at Jack. “You be careful, man,” he said.

  “Yeah. I’ll do that. You, too.”

  The cable layer nodded and sauntered off. Jack went in search of a food tray. He’d wondered why they hadn’t been melded with the old crew. If there was a problem, it explained why. The contractors filling the cafeteria were a glum, intense lot this mid-shift.

  Stash grinned at Jack and said, in a very loud whisper, “I figure, what with all the triple time that’s being done on my card and with all the money I’m making from my little side enterprises, I’ll be able to buy out in, oh, say—year and a half at the most.”

  Jack felt a quiver go up his spine. Most of the men here were in for two to five years. A lifetime in Lasertown, with little to look forward to but a walk to the other side of the town or maybe an afternoon in the hydroponics gardens. The fact that they’d earned this future, in one way or another, didn’t make it any easier to live. “Lay off, Stash,” he said.

  “Righto, mate. Course, lookit you. Maybe you got something going with the spider lady, right? No need to work out your contract. Maybe you could introduce Fri
tzi here. From what I hear, he likes that kind of thing. The tangler would just make him tingle.”

  The volcano of a man in front of him exploded, smashing the food tray into Stash’s face, then grabbing him and making a fairly good attempt at mopping the floor with him.

  Two other crewmen took the opportunity to jump Jack. He shook off one and found himself toe to toe with the other. Adrenalin surged. By god, it felt good to be in a fight, Jack thought, and swung.

  Food slung through the air like the garbage it was, great lumpy, soggy gobs of soy protein. Jack ducked. The miner slugging it out with him took a deep, happy breath.

  “This is great,” he said.

  Jack agreed and swung again, connecting with a jolt he felt all the way to his elbow. The miner dropped, still grinning ear to ear.

  Stash appeared on the backswing. “C’mon, mate, let’s get out of here.”

  The entire cafeteria had erupted with brawling bodies. Jack felt more alive than he had in weeks. The mêlée invigorated him.

  “Why?”

  “Th’ Sweepers! I don’t want to lose all my hard earned credits. Follow me.”

  Jack almost made it to the cafeteria doors.

  He didn’t feel invigorated when he left the foreman’s office and even Stash looked a little pale.

  He caught up with Jack. “Hey, mate, how was I to know?”

  “To know what? I don’t mind being fined for the fight—I enjoyed that. No, it was being hooked with your pimping and narcotics dealing that bothers me.” Jack felt the rage burning through him, but it wasn’t clean anger this time. It was anger that would have to fester because he couldn’t do anything about it.

  Stash shrugged. “You knew I was hustling.”

  “And you know I’m nothing more to you than a work partner. Why didn’t you stand up for me in there?”