Rock Lavey
Session 1 — The Ragged Edge of Space
Rock Lavey woke first, which felt about right. Somebody has to be conscious to watch the others come up, and that job has fallen to him his whole life, in operating theatres and in worse rooms since. The docking ring smelled of recycled air and hard labor, and through the glass the bots crawled the hulls like they were dressing a wound that would never close. He had shipped himself here frozen to save the credits he did not have. A struck-off surgeon does not get to be proud about how he travels.
He is the sharp eye, and the eye did not stop working just because the license did. At the Silk Abbey he clocked the substances moving through the crowd before anyone said a word, the libido enhancers that were harmless enough and the amphetamine underneath them that was not, the kind of thing that turns a good night into a body on a slab at a high enough dose. Later, in the Nova Nexus holo-pit, he read the fight the way he reads everything, from the inside out. The veteran Clubber was being walked to an easy win before a bigger night. The setup was plain to anyone who knew where to look, and Rock always knows where to look.
What he carries and does not say is heavier than any of it. He scanned Six once and learned exactly what the big man is, property with a maker’s mark and a bounty on it, and he chose to say nothing. Two debtors on the same dead-end station, bound by a secret one of them does not even know is being kept. Rock has spent a career deciding who lives on a table. He decided this one quietly, the way he decides everything now, and moved on before anyone could thank him for it.
Session 2 — The MacMillian Anomaly
Weeks of patrols had taught Rock the station’s real anatomy, the way a body teaches you where it hurts. So when the work took him and Six down to Station 45 on the Main Line and a knot of gang men tried to fold themselves back into the shadows, he already knew what he was looking at before Six pointed them out. He did the talking. Not because he trusts men like that, but because talk buys distance, and distance is the only thing a non-combatant medic ever really has to spend. He kept his voice level and his hands where they could be seen, and he got what he came for, that Harsha Trent had welched on the bookies and been thrown out like refuse. Then he counted the perimeter closing around them, ten more drifting in loose, and he read the arithmetic of the room the way he reads a failing patient. Time to go. He and Six turned and walked, unhurried, before anyone forced the issue.
The evening went sideways in a smaller, stupider way, and Rock was the one who caught it. Six had chased a tip from a Nova Nexus guard straight into a dead corridor and a station-wide alarm, and afterward, sitting with Shackleton Magellan and running back the man’s face and posture in his head, Rock saw the whole con laid out clean. The guard had never known a thing. He had just wanted them gone, and he had picked the loud one and pointed him at nothing. Rock found it funny in the flat, tired way he finds most things funny now. People give themselves away in the smallest tells, a slackness around the mouth, a beat too long before the answer, and he has spent a lifetime watching for exactly that half-second when the body says what the mouth won’t.
The four a.m. alarm was the one that mattered. Before they geared up he went through his own supplies and pulled three stimulants, the kind he’d tell you flatly can stop a heart as easily as start one if you push them into the wrong body under stress, and he tucked them away anyway, because a man going into an offline sector with no cameras plans for the worst thing he can imagine. When the container in Processing II tore loose and the depressurization warnings lit every surface red, Rock did not freeze and did not play hero. He and Ronin Sanchez got into the break room and sealed the door, and he stayed there with a man he could actually protect while Six leapt into the dark after the thing that vanished. He came out the far side of it having witnessed something the whole Republic insists cannot exist, non-human tech and a vortex and the careful, deliberate work of someone who badly wanted it never found. He can prove none of it. He knows what he saw.
The orders to Thides III arrived the next morning dressed up as a maintenance escort, and Rock read the label off it in a heartbeat. You do not ship your only witnesses to an exclusion zone the same week a corporate money-man is in your entertainment district unless you want them somewhere they can’t talk. He said as much, quietly, to Shackleton, who had already reached the same floor. He is not angry about it the way Ronin Sanchez is angry. Anger is a luxury for people who still expect the powerful to play fair. Rock just notes it, the way he notes a pulse threadying under his fingers, and files it, and gets on the ship, because the crew is getting on the ship and he does not leave the crew.
Session 3 — Buckle Up, Motherfuckers
The crash sorted the crew into the conscious and the not, and once again Rock was the one still awake, which is the oldest arrangement of his life. Six, Ronin Sanchez, Jareth — all three folded and still in a smoking hull in a jungle that had already started sending things to eat them, and one medic on his feet with a hand of stimulants he keeps precisely because a man plans for the worst thing he can picture. He went down the line and brought them back one at a time, a shot and a slap and a name, the way you work a room full of the nearly-dead when there is no room and no light and the walls are dissolving under acid spit. Nobody thanks you for that either. You just do the next body.
He kept the eye working through all of it, because the eye is the only thing the license never took. When the rolling furred things came for the wreck he put the omni rifle on stun out of habit and instead of dropping the creature it began to purr, delighted, rolling in the discharge like a cat in sun, and Rock filed that under the flat exhausted comedy that is most of what he finds funny now — a whole planet built to kill you and here was a piece of it enjoying the wrong end of his gun. Later, aboard the ship they stole, it was Rock who traced the bricks in the back to the wires running off the hull and understood the shape of it a half-second before it mattered: the whole hold was rigged, and the only reason they were not a cloud of debris was that Six had clocked the same wires on his way in. Two men who read the room from opposite ends, arriving at the same answer in time.
He shed the heavy surgical case in the jungle to keep pace, which cost him something he will not say out loud — a surgeon setting down his tools to run is a surgeon admitting there are nights the running matters more. But he ran, and the crew lived, and this time they did not come out of it empty. A ship that jumps without a gate, a bound man breathing in the back, a hold full of the impossible. Last time all he had was the thing he’d said to himself in the dark, that he could prove none of it and knew what he saw. Tonight the proof is bolted to the deck under his boots. And the trouble with proof, he knows the way he knows a threadying pulse, is that the people it damns will want it back.
Session 4 — The Case of the Missing Courtesan
He spent the flight home with his own stitches and a medical kit, which is the closest thing to rest he gets. When the Marshal’s voice came through the cockpit demanding to know who they were, it was Rock who found the line that worked, MacMillian security on authorised orders, said flat and bored and exactly the way a man says a thing he has said a hundred times. Twenty years of talking to people who could take everything from him taught him that the trick is never the lie. The trick is sounding like the truth is too dull to bother decorating.
Then the station, and steak and lobster and a woman on the promenade watching them from a distance that Rock clocked before she wanted him to. And then a missing woman, which is a different kind of work, and the kind he is quietly better at than anyone else on the crew. At The Silk Abbey he asked for the women one at a time, in private, and that choice is the whole of him. He could have stood them in a room and asked questions at all of them. Instead he gave each one a closed door and his full attention, the way you take a history off a frightened patient, and they told him things nobody was going to volunteer to a uniform. McKenna told him about the party. About Brianna Melvin being asked to stay behind. About the trips to Aethel and the gifts, once or twice a month, routine, until this time.
In Room 2002 he worked the left bedroom with Shackleton Magellan and found what a doctor finds. Ammonia, hard and fresh in a room that had no business smelling of anything. No bedding. No marks. A space cleaned by people who knew what they were cleaning it of, which is a smell he can read as easily as a chart. And behind the headboard, missed, one earring. He has stood in enough rooms where the evidence was already gone to know precisely what that room was, and precisely how little that knowledge is worth to anyone with the power to act on it. Brianna Melvin has a child and a mother over in Processing I. Nobody in that hotel was ever going to be asked about either.
When the gas came down the corridor on the cargo level he moved to engage, which he does now without the pause he used to have. Struck off, bankrupt, and running, and he still walks toward the shooting. The eye is the thing the licence never took, and so is that.
Session 5 — Hostile Takeover
The prisoner was dead weight and prison fatigues are awkward on a limp body, and Rock had done worse jobs with better people. He worked the man’s arms through the sleeves the way he used to work a patient onto a table, and his hands, which have not been licensed to do anything for a long time, found the wrong thing behind the right ear. A flap of skin, and under it a port. A physical connector, wired, in a body, on a station where the toaster talks to the door. He had a full second to decide what that was worth to him privately, and then he called it out and put it on the record, because a doctor who starts keeping findings is not a doctor with a problem, he is just a criminal with good hands.
What came off that port rearranged the session. Patrol routes. Shift schedules. Files on all of them pulled out of MacMillian’s own HR system, thorough enough to list every maintenance request Six had ever filed. Somebody inside the building had sold them, and Holger Graeme narrowed it to three names and one of them was the man who signed his own paychecks. Rock had already taken a working grazer off the floor and put it away, which is its own quiet answer to the question of how much he trusts the institution he just handed evidence to.
On Thides I he did the job he keeps not being allowed to do. Shackleton Magellan took a blaster round through the tactical suit, the fabric doing exactly what fabric does against a focused beam, and Rock went to work with trauma patches and nanomachines on a catwalk in a mining cavern with the shooting not fully finished. He kept him. Then he ran fuel and water lines into a ship in Docking Bay 36 while armoured infantry came down the corridor, because somebody has to do the plumbing and the plumbing is what makes the difference between a getaway and a slow death in vacuum with a full magazine.
He was on sensors when they cleared the station and he was the one who counted what was waiting. Two transports. Eight fighters, at least. He said the numbers out loud and the numbers did not help anybody, and then space opened up sideways and swallowed them. He is out of the system with a stolen weapon, a stolen ship, a prisoner in the back, and a dead Marshal’s evidence, and the last person who could have vouched for any of it is Julija Borja, who is on a deck behind them with a knife wound in her neck.
Session 6 — The Albatross Takes Flight
There was no medbay, so he built one. Crates out of the cargo space, moving blankets, netting strung to partition it off, and every crate bolted down to the deck because he has seen what loose mass does to people in a hard turn. It is not a surgery. It is four walls and a flat surface and somewhere to put a body, and it is the first room on this ship that exists because somebody decided people were going to get hurt and planned for it.
He turned up a first aid kit among the crew’s gear with an auto-doc in it, spray-on bandages, an adrenaline shot, a defibrillator with the hookups still sealed. Better kit than he has had in years. He worked through the crew’s injuries from the escape slowly, over days, without rushing any of it, because for the first time since the Thides system there was nothing chasing them and no reason to do a fast job.
He watched Six take a man to an airlock and did not intervene, and Ronin Sanchez did. He has not written that down anywhere and he is not going to. He carried on sorting a medical kit while a man was being told the terms of his survival, and that is a thing he now knows about himself on this ship.
In the facility he took the bottom of the stairs and held the corridor, which is where he is useful and where he is not the one making the decisions. When Shackleton Magellan needed a weapon at the ramp he handed over his pistol without a word and let a better shot use it. He had already given the grazer he pulled off the ambusher to Ronin Sanchez, because Ronin fires four guns and Rock fires none by preference, and the gun should go where it will actually be pointed at something. Afterwards he patched the scorch off Six’s back in a room made of packing crates and put him back to full, which is the only kind of arithmetic he trusts.
Session 7 — The Goodwin Contract
The transit was the kind of quiet Rock Lavey knows how to use. He kept the crate-and-blanket infirmary in order, worked out what a real meal would take from the ship’s gutted galley, and arrived at a conclusion he filed rather than fought: the medbay he wants cannot be built by anyone aboard. It needs a starship engineer. Knowing exactly where your competence ends is a surgeon’s discipline, and he has kept it longer than he kept the license.
At the House of Parts he did what the sharp eye does. While Roselyn Monroe played her little theatre with the device and the bag, he was the one who clocked the trophies and awards tucked away behind the junk in her office, the shape of a life she had chosen to hide rather than lose. He confirmed for her what the bag held, Julija Borja’s evidence against Kinetic Logistics, and watched her speak about Julija in the past tense before anyone had told her a thing. Then he went through the junkyard with Shackleton Magellan and came out with the bones of his future medbay, a salvaged bed and a scanner, no med computer yet.
The city gave him his best hour of the campaign so far. On the stakeout he steered Shackleton out of the wrong direction at the transit stop, and when they fell back to a bar to look like anyone, he fell into conversation with a table of Firetemic engineers and let them talk. They gave him the 17th floor, the locked-down service elevator, Peter Goodwin’s standing in the building, even their experimental foam grenade, all of it free, all of it over drinks, because people tell a good listener everything. He said very little. And when a manhole cover shifted in the street outside and he understood exactly who was under it, he said nothing at all.
Session 8 — A Crappy Plan Comes Together
The doctor’s job in the subway was to be a wall. He and Ronin Sanchez stood where the cameras could not see past them while Shackleton Magellan robbed a sleeping man of nothing physical, and when the droid came Rock did what he does best, which is nothing suspicious at all. In the tower lobby he went over the turnstile because the badge was for one man and the drones came out of the ceiling anyway. On the 16th floor he helped search a lab for a way up and found, as he generally does, that the way up was the hard one.
The ladder in the service shaft was steel and his boots were loud on it, and the first burst of blaster fire came up from below the moment he made a sound. He kept climbing. The foam grenade from above him stopped the shooting. At the top he and Ronin heaved the doors and found four rifles and four red dots on their chests, and he had the sense to let the doors close again, which is the kind of medical judgement that keeps a surgeon alive. He came up through the hole in the floor after the shooting, into dust and polymer and two dead men, and did what he came for. Six had a trauma patch already on the burns and the grazer had gone through the armor to reach him. Rock put him back together as far as a field kit allows, on the floor of a corporate office with the shutters coming down, and did not remark on the smell.
He went down the fire stairs behind a man riding the banister with a hostage on his back, out the alley door as the lights came round the front, and into the sewer after everyone else. Nobody handed him a gun this session either. He is the crew’s eyes and its hands, and on the 17th floor both were needed and both were there.
Session 9 — Snakes on a Catwalk
The doctor’s contribution to the tunnel started with the security signals. He read the planetary channels down in the Aethel City Sewers and learned the crew were persons of interest with no names attached, and that the only clear image on file was a blurry frame of Six in full body armor carrying someone out of the Firetemic Tower. Then the digging started, and the roof of Six’s tunnel began to come down, and Rock went looking with Shackleton Magellan for anything that would hold it up. They came back with old pipe and corrugated metal. When the security drone came round the corner and Shackleton ran, Rock picked up a chunk of concrete and threw it. It hit the drone with a clang and the drone did not notice.
He went into the tunnel after that, because the Aethel Safety Bureau squad was coming down from a T-junction with flashlights, and he squeezed in beside Six to clear the dirt as it came off the blade. A thin wire tube pushed through the wall an inch from his face and started breathing gas into the space. Rock shoved it into the dirt, dug a surgical mask out of his medical kit, and tried to punch a ventilation hole through the ceiling, and the gas had a head start on all of it. Six kept digging. Rock kept clearing and shoring. When the plug came out of the cinder block he hauled Peter Goodwin out of the tunnel and made for the nearest cover, a support pylon, just as a guard glanced over. The guard looked back at the drill. The two of them followed the conveyor belts to Storage B-342.
Roselyn Monroe was standing there with a hose. Rock listened while she stepped outside to talk to somebody and heard a man’s voice ask whether it had been done quietly, and heard her say they had gotten who he wanted. The man who came through the door was Leonard Romeijn. Rock knew the face from the news footage at the Firetemic Tower. He watched the major confirm Goodwin’s identity, watched a crate go onto a hover cart with Goodwin in it, and heard the twenty-four hours: leave his station, or be handed to the planetary authorities. At the ship an hour later Monroe fitted a legal transponder and left Shackleton Magellan a frequency code. Marlo Petrak recommended the thousand-credit run to Peric IV D over the five-thousand-credit Betelgeuse II job that wanted two armed guards aboard, and the crew took the safe one.
Session 10 — Six Shooters and Four Arms
Six days in hyperspace with a crew that spars for recreation. Rock patched the bruises, noted again that the ship has no real medbay and that Six’s habits make that a problem, and observed that long stretches on military rations start to work on a person’s head. His own nights were bad: nightmares hard enough to wake Ronin Sanchez.
At Acheron’s Rest he walked the dock with Shackleton Magellan and counted the other hulls, a planetary transport and a short-range carrier. At The Outpost Cantina he watched Six drink everything put in front of him and answered with a pitcher of water, which Six also drank.
He saw the glint on the ridge a moment before the first shot. When Ronin could not get the transport out of the ditch, Rock pushed him aside and took the controls, and did no better at first. Then the smoke came, and hands came in through the open cab and started pulling him out of the seat. Six burned the man off him from halfway down the hill. Rock got the tracks to bite and drove (The Rocky Pass Ambush).
Session 11 — The Cost of a Clone’s Life
Rock went through the dead with Six. Every one of them had the same face. He recognised the vials in the cargo as Castellan Biodynamics product, and the leaves in the raiders’ pouches as Stimulodiscus pericensis: Black Ice, native to this moon, raw stimulant, long-term psychosis. Holding one close was enough to feel it. The dead men had nearly empty vials and injectors, some hospital-grade and some made from whatever was to hand. He put the consolidated pouch in his own pocket and later hid it on his person.
Gunfire woke him at the Roberts Estate and he woke the others. He found the overseer of the medical building beaten, with a deep gash across the head, and stabilized him. A crate was gone from the room. The crew’s transport outside had fresh blaster scorches on it (The Roberts Estate Storm Raid).
At Santo Jin’s Station there were injured clones in plain sight. Rock offered to treat them. Santo Jin refused him at once. Through an open door he saw a laboratory in zero-G, clones working hoses and vessels, and crates of the same leaves. In the jump he took the thumbprint lock off a captured Grazer Rifle, with Shackleton Magellan’s gizmos behind the roll. Six offered to teach him the pistol.
Session 12 — That Would Be a Mistake
Rock kept the ship with Ronin Sanchez on Katha V and watched the field. A man climbed down from the modified starfighter on the next pad: patchwork armor, sugar skulls on the shoulder plates, the walk of someone the army had trained. He went to the Good Fortune building, slipped a worker something, and drove off across the tundra in a company vehicle (The Armored Bounty Hunter).
When Hasib Eberhardt called ahead to search The Albatross, Rock loaded knockout syringes and waited. The search found nothing. Eberhardt showed them a hologram of a missing entertainer and mentioned a reward. Later, going through the pictures Six kept sending from the boat, Rock found a woman in the group photo working to keep her face out of it. Adelina Feliciano. He and Shackleton Magellan talked through what a tip could buy and what it could cost, and chose to make one.
He saw the end of it from the ship: the same jeep with a company logo on the door, the armored man walking a hooded woman to the starfighter, the lift-off. When the sergeant came back shouting, Rock pointed at the empty pad.
At Chae-gul 147 he was slow with the crates and Marlo Petrak took over from him. Through the four days to the Dinon System he kept the medbay in order and made a friend of Marlo.
Session 13 — Albatross Security LLC: The Zenith Job
In the queue for the Rangi-Perihelion Elevator Rock found himself counting the crowd the way he counts breaths, and some of it did not add up: men in holiday shirts whose eyes kept going to the security windows overhead. Police, working the queue. He noted them and said so, then held still, which is what he does best. On the way down the glass car showed him fields of giant stalks falling to laser chainsaws and pools of indigo fluid churning outside the city. At 1.2G the medical bag weighed more than it should, and he carried it anyway.
He signed on with Albatross Security LLC for Apice Entertainment, took the bodysuit, vest, boots and stun wand, and slept at the Perihelion Super 8. Before the shift he and Shack tried the meat on a stick from the carts near the plaza. Nobody could say what it was. It was the best thing he had eaten in weeks.
On patrol a pack of teenagers slipped the line, chasing autographs from the performers on stage. Ronin snapped his stun wand at them and they didn’t even look round. Rock walked over and told them, calmly, that this was the wrong place for autographs, in the voice he used to use for telling families where to wait, and they went. Kids that age should be somewhere safe and bored. It cost him nothing to send them there.
When the Channel 7 News crew arrived, he and Shack looked at those clean-cut faces and thought the same thing: they had seen them under protest signs outside the Apice Entertainment Building a few hours earlier. The credentials checked out. Rock kept looking anyway. Near the plaza he watched local police leaning on a street kid, and he stayed where he was. A stranger with a stun wand, under a contract that made every mistake his own, was not going to make that boy’s night better, and Rock knows exactly how wrong he can be when he is sure. He let it go. It didn’t go far.
Then Six pinged a hotel window, Shack’s swarm found a rifle in the room, and the order came back to stand down (The Esplanade Sniper). Whoever it was walked out.
Session 14 — Iced Tea
Rock had the Apice Security Contract in his head the way he used to carry drug interactions, and the van outside the noodle place looked like trouble with a clause attached. Anything they touched off the clock was theirs to answer for, alone. He laid it out, said the only safe thing was to put it on record with Harrelson, and knew as he said it that Harrelson would not care. Shack heard him out and went to enjoy his evening. Rock had been sure about things before. He let it go.
Earlier that day he and Marlo had walked into the real Channel 7 News reporter doing a field piece, and every face he had looked at twice on the plaza moved a little. The “crew” they had waved through were fakes. He had been right to keep looking. It didn’t feel like winning.
Outside the Ritz-Carlton Six introduced him to Sylvie as the young man she had asked for, and the whole tour group heard it. He saw the couples’ faces and saw Six about to become the third wheel on six dates at once, so he handed Six to the widowers and turned to Sylvie, who was not subtle. Dinner at her reserved table told him the rest: she had cancelled other plans to fit him in, and her hand on his leg was a hand on an invoice. It was a transaction and he was the purchase. He decided that was fine. It was honest, in its way. At dawn she gave him cab fare and the door.
He found Six slumped against his room in ash and lipstick, insisting he had been poisoned, and the diagnosis took him about four seconds. It was the easiest call he had made in years, and there was something in being right about something small and fixable. At the looted drugstore the owner was sweeping glass with the anger of somebody who has nobody to bill, and he paid twenty for a three-credit cure because it was the one thing in the street he could fix. She came back out with a second remedy. He took that as the exchange rate on decency.
At the sound check he saw the guards at each corner of Adelina Feliciano’s stage, and he knew the faces before he knew why. That complexion is Wu. Home, and the place that wants him back on a warrant. If he can read them across a plaza, they can read him, and he kept his distance and said what he had seen. That night, when the bouncers at The Club dragged out a man trailing P.E.T.A. pamphlets, Rock knew him too: one of the three from Davis Electronics.