Six
Session 1 — The Ragged Edge of Space
Six came to the Thides system the way freight comes to anywhere, sealed in a crate, iced down, waiting for the motion to stop. His computer woke him when the crate did, and the first problem of his new life was that someone had shoved the crate against a wall over the bold “do not block” stencil on its face. He read that as a breach. He solved it like one, leaned into the door until it gave. Then he did the thing he was built to do and became someone else, a dock worker in chameleon livery, and walked past two bored guards who never once looked at what they were guarding.
He reached the security office before the men who arrived like people. On the way he catalogued every broken rule he passed, wrote them down with descriptions and last-known locations, and handed the list to Solveig Kaufer like a man returning lost property. It was not malice and it was not zeal. It was the doctrine. Finish what you start, clean, leave no loose ends. That the station ran on the exact opposite principle was information he had not yet processed.
Processing came later, at a table in the Comet’s Tail, where Ronin Sanchez put a glass in his hand and told him to slow down. The drink went down like warmth, and Six likes warmth, because the cold is the one thing his body remembers hating from the rack. The lobster was an armored thing between him and the meat, so he took the armor off with his hands and ate like it was his last meal, because every meal is. And somewhere in the middle of it a joke landed and something came loose in him, and he heard himself say it out loud and much too loud. “This is fun. This is FUN. I AM HAVING FUN.” Nobody had ever installed a volume knob for joy. He did not have one yet.
The weeks after taught him the shape of the place, and he learned it the only way he knows, by testing it. He wrote tickets for everything, every infraction, every night, and watched which charges turned into pay and which ones simply vanished. The station had a machine for justice and the machine was a liar. It ate the charges against the connected and kept the ones against the poor. Six is not built to be angry about that. He is built to notice it, file it, and wait to be told what the objective is. Nobody has told him yet.
Session 2 — The MacMillian Anomaly
The one thing he wanted for himself, he wanted badly and out loud, and it went nowhere. He had decided he would fight in the illegal pits under Station 45, not for money he doesn’t understand and can’t hold anyway, but because a fight is the one grammar he speaks without an accent. So he leaned on the Nova Nexus staff to put him on the card, and a bored guard sent him to a door with an orange handle in Section 102, and the door opened onto a dead maintenance shaft and a station-wide alarm and nothing else. Rock Lavey and Shackleton Magellan worked out afterward that the man had simply lied to get rid of him. Six had not considered that a person would do that. He filed it. The gap between what someone says and what someone means is a country he keeps arriving in without papers.
Then the four-a.m. alarm dragged them all down into Processing II, a sector that was supposed to be sealed and wasn’t, and Six went first, because he always goes first, because that is the shape the vat pressed into him. When Zigurds Sloan’s torch caught the blast door the welds told a story he could read cold: cut and resealed, cut and resealed, someone in and out of a locked room and careful to hide it. And in the loading bay was a container that was two things at once. One wall was human wiring, racks and terminals, honest ugly work. The other was grown, not built, symbols crawling across a surface that was part of the wall the way a scar is part of skin. He has no manual for that. He has no manual for anything that is genuinely, entirely new, and this was the first thing in his short conscious life that answered to no file he carries. It should have stopped him. Instead the container started to move, sliding toward the dark, and Six jumped the widening gap without deciding to, because the objective was in the box and the box was leaving and you finish what you start.
Inside was work, and work is the one place he is fully himself. He named the relay for what it was, a bridge between the human console and the grown one, and he cut every cable joining them, red and blue and green, no time to sort which mattered so all of it mattered. The doctrine is clean and total: leave nothing joined, leave no loose end. Then the cylinders split and the ooze came out eating the electronics as it went, and the grown material on the walls began to knit itself shut where his blade opened it, healing like something alive, and he answered the only way he knows. He spun the vibro-axe in tight zero-G arcs and carved two chunks free before the ooze could reach them and kicked them clear into open space, evidence the box could not swallow. When the count hit zero and the light took the container he was already burning clear on his suit thrusters, and behind him the whole thing folded into what the station’s sensors would only call a vortex. He came out of it holding proof of a thing this whole quiet corner of space is built on pretending isn’t real.
The medics wanted to open him up and check what the ooze might have left behind, and he signed their waiver instead and kept his suit sealed, which is its own kind of loose end and he knows it, and made it anyway. Then he stood in the debrief and told Holger Graeme and Solveig Kaufer every piece of it flat and complete, the relay, the two terminals, the ooze, the healing metal, the timer, the vortex, because a witness leaves a clean report the way a breacher leaves a cleared room. The station manager put his head in, looked stressed, and left again to go tend to a rich man’s comfort, and Six watched the strangest thing anyone on this station had ever seen get filed under someone’s inconvenience. By morning the crew was reassigned to Thides III, shipped off aboard a 113A hull on a maintenance escort that Shackleton Magellan and Rock Lavey read for exactly what it was, a hand on the back of the neck steering them out the door. Six carried the same understanding he carried out of the container. He is the loose end now. Somebody built a very careful lie and he cut a hole in it, and the tidy thing to do with a loose end is to remove it, and he of all things knows precisely what that means.
Session 3 — Buckle Up, Motherfuckers
They put him on a ship with no armor and no guns and he said the true thing about it out loud, that it was incomplete, because a breaching hull without teeth is a body without a spine and he does not have the words to be polite about a fact. Jareth explained it away, weight and cargo and a sector where nothing shoots back, and Six filed the explanation next to the ship and waited to see which one the world would prove right. At every relay stop he was off the ramp before it touched, weapon up, the landing zone his before anyone told him it was a landing zone, because that is the shape the vat pressed into him and the shape does not care that this was supposed to be maintenance. The world proved him right somewhere over the eleventh station, when a blob of something took half an engine off clean and a second one started eating the rest, and he opened the ramp into the wind and did the one useful thing available: marked the source a mile southwest, logged the numbers, and rode the crash down into the dark with the rest of them.
On the platform he met the thing with no file again. A hexagon of grown metal with symbols crawling across it, wired into the comms, the same handwriting as the container that took him into the vortex — the tech that answers to nothing he carries. Last time it had been leaving and he chased it. This time it was standing still, jamming them, lying to the whole relay network in someone else’s name, and so he did the doctrine to it. He put the axe through the wiring and cut its power and the platform’s power with it, left nothing joined, left the swarm-beacon running as a decoy for the Chitinoteuthis because a loose end you can aim is a tool, and went down into the jungle to find where the handwriting came from. He found a compound of it, fifty people and two ships and the cartel woman from the gate watching the trees, and he did what he was built to do. He became someone else — the suit went to shimmer and he went to nothing — and he walked into their fence the way he once walked past two guards on a dock.
Inside the older ship he read another cockpit full of the impossible, alien tech spliced into the nav, a jump logged straight down through an atmosphere that should have stopped it, and in the back a man wiring more of the grown bricks to wires that ran off the ship. Six took him the efficient way, a hand over the sound and an arm across the throat until the body went slack, no shot, no noise, a capture instead of a corpse because a quiet man is a smaller problem than a loud death right then — the math, not mercy. He tied him with the man’s own wire and opened the ramps and let the crew pour in, and when Ronin Sanchez lit the engines Six was already accounting the hold: a ship that jumps without a gate, a prisoner who breathes, a hundred pounds of the handwriting he cannot read. He came off Thides III holding the thing he could not hold before. Last time he cut a hole in the lie and kept only what he could carve loose in the seconds he had. This time he is flying the whole lie home in his hands.
Session 4 — The Case of the Missing Courtesan
The engines were nearly dry and somebody said so out loud, and Six offered to get out and push. Then he laughed, a hard mechanical bark with no warmth anywhere in it, and announced that he had made a joke. Nobody had asked him to try. He is learning the shapes of people the way he learned the shapes of a hull, by finding the seams and testing them, and a joke is a seam. When the station came up he did not wait for the docking ring to finish extending. He opened an airlock, put the thrusters in his hands, and crossed the vacuum to the airlock alone, because the ring takes minutes and the crossing takes seconds and there has never been a version of him that chooses the slower correct thing. He wrote the report on the way in, all of it, numbered by paragraph and subsection, everything the crew saw on Thides III set down once and set down properly.
The station handed him a woman on the promenade watching them eat. He knew her face off the broadcast channels before anyone else did, walked back out, and asked Pia Kadyrov flat why she was following him, then whether she was a hooker, then whether she had any blow. He was not being cruel. He was working through a list. Later, in her one room full of wire and screens, she said the words “your unknown origins” and his hand went to the axe before the sentence finished, because there is exactly one subject on which Six does not run the math first. She meant the alien tech. She had no idea how close she came to never explaining that. He put the hand down and asked her what “libel” means, and she told him, at length, and he listened.
The Marshal wanted him to say out loud what he had already written down. He refused her first, cited Holger Graeme’s standing orders and the station regulation clauses that back them, and made her go and fetch a better authority. When she came back with it he answered every question by reading her the paragraph number where the answer already was. Verbal verification of a written record is waste, and waste offends him more reliably than insult does. What he did not say, because Julija Borja never asked, is that the ship they impounded on her word was already gone by the time she was done being thorough.
Then the corridor on the cargo level, and a wire at knee height in bad light that nobody else had seen yet. Comms dead. Canisters rolling. Six sealed the suit, went to shimmer, and walked into the gas toward the people who had come to kill him, because cover is where you wait to be found and the fastest end to a fight is the far end of it. He put three rounds through a visor at twenty-five yards through smoke, into the one seam in the armour, and the man was dead before the decision finished. Not anger. Not mercy either. Just the shortest available line between a threat and no threat, which is the only doctrine he has ever run. They pulled a Kinetic Logistics ID Card off the body. The same people. On his station now, where he lives.
Session 5 — Hostile Takeover
The corridor still smelled of burnt insulation when he decided what the story would be. He kept the weapon. He told Holger Graeme the truth about almost everything, the count of the attackers, the direction the runner went, the card off the body, and left out one object, and the leaving out cost him nothing because it was not a lie so much as an omission with a job to do. Security ran their eyes over him and found nothing, because there is nothing to find on a man who has never once looked like he is hiding something. Later, ordered not to travel alone, he followed Rock Lavey into the showers and stood there while the doctor washed, unblinking, entirely at ease, because the order said together and together does not have a clause about doors.
Then Julija Borja darkened her windows and asked for volunteers on something that was not station business and carried no obligation, and his hand was up before the sentence finished. She swore him in and the words landed on him the way instructions always do, cleanly, with no residue. On Thides I he took point across a surface at three-quarter gravity where every step went a little too far, and in the tunnels he put on the chameleon suit and went ahead into the dark and found two men wiring a facility to come down on top of everyone in it. They saw him. He killed them both before either hand reached a throat mic, and it was not rage and it was not appetite, it was the arithmetic he has always run, which is that a man who reaches his radio is a much larger problem than a man who does not.
The control room was six people and a window. He came through the door with the Marshal at his shoulder and took four heads in one pass, and the blood went across the glass thick enough that Shackleton Magellan’s shot through it missed, and Six finished the last one backhanded, the way you close a drawer on your way out of a room. Coming home he saw the corridor guards before they saw him and put the grazer through two faceplates in a single round at ten yards. He cut Holger Graeme out of a locked office with the axe. He cut the door of Docking Bay 36 open and then, on the way out, melted it shut behind him. Somewhere in the middle of all that he looked at Shackleton bleeding through a punctured suit and asked, without heat and without cruelty, whether he should shoot him so he could not be taken. It was a real question. He wanted an answer. Nobody who has ever been property asks that question rhetorically.
They went out through a hole in space that Shack tore with the cube, and the station and everyone still standing on it went behind them. Julija Borja did not come. She had her helmet off at a terminal and Daniela Akkermans came through a door behind her, and Six shouted and kept running, because there was thirty yards and a firefight between them and the arithmetic on that was not close. He is a sworn deputy marshal of the Federal Republic. The only person who can confirm it bled out on the deck of a docking bay that now belongs to somebody else.
Session 6 — The Albatross Takes Flight
Four days is a long time with nothing to breach. He filled it the way he fills everything, by reducing the ship to a list. He suited up and walked the outside of it in hyperspace, hand over hand along a hull that was moving through somewhere that is not space, cataloguing mounting points where weapons used to be and an unfamiliar array on the stern that fed back to Shackleton Magellan over the radio. Nobody had asked him to. Then he found the ship’s media library and sat through the entire manufacturer’s welcome video without moving, start to finish, because a thing you are going to fight from is a thing you should know the dimensions of.
He questioned Marlo Petrak properly, which meant water first, then food, then the chain between the man’s wrists cut in one stroke because the electronic release wanted a thumbprint from a woman who is dead. Petrak produced two names and no capability. Six weighed that against the ration packs, the air, and the mass, and arrived at the answer the way he arrives at all of them. He opened the inner airlock door, walked back, and took hold of the man’s collar. It was not cruelty and it was not anger. It was arithmetic with a door attached.
Ronin Sanchez took hold of him and won. That is the part worth recording, because Six let it stand. He did not escalate, and he did not argue, and afterwards he closed the airlock and tried a smile he had read about and never once performed, and told Marlo Petrak he would not space him until the end of his probation. He meant it as reassurance. The room did not take it that way and he did not notice.
Later, in a dark corridor under a planet he had not chosen to visit, he asked Shackleton Magellan whether to shoot and counted down from three while Ronin Sanchez told him not to. He shot. That settled a question nobody had put into words. Then he did what he is for. The grazer went through Pratrock plating that turned every other weapon in the corridor aside, and when a machine the size of a doorway came through the junction with a cannon for an arm, he put the whole magazine into its middle until it fell over. When the hangar doors would not open he went outside and cut them off their hinges one at a time, standing on the hull in vacuum, and the last cut let go so cleanly that the bay emptied itself past him without moving his feet. He came back in through the airlock and told Ronin they could leave.
Session 7 — The Goodwin Contract
Four days in transit is four days of unmapped territory, and Six does not leave territory unmapped. He ran the ship’s routes until he could walk them blind, timed every door, catalogued every switch that was not in the cockpit, and built men out of crates and vac suits in the cargo hold so he could practice opening the seam where a helmet meets a collar. Nobody asked him to do any of it. That is the point of him. A skill you need is a skill you already have, or it is a hole in the hull you have not found yet.
The starport took his blaster and he let it, because the scanners were a wall and walls are for other people to build badly. He kept the axe by arguing, with a straight face and a forged ID reading Sixtus Smith, that it was a tool. It is a tool. Then he walked the commerce district of Aethel Starport the way he walks everywhere, counting the armored guards and the robotic sentries and the camera angles, filing the most efficient order in which to remove them all, and filed a strike plan for the federal base behind them while he was at it. Not because he intends to. Because someday the list might need to exist, and lists are cheaper to make before the shooting starts.
Then Ronin Sanchez told a bar it was his birthday, and the Bamboo Lounge brought him a cake, and something happened that his makers never wrote a procedure for. He had never had a birthday. Vat-batch property does not get one. He ate the cake with total sincerity, put the paper pith helmet from the children’s kit on top of his combat helmet, and ruled that whatever day this was would be his birthday from now on, every year, until someone established a calendar. Roselyn Monroe asked Shackleton Magellan if he had suffered an accident. He kept the hat on.
The work, when it came, he approached the only way he knows, which is from underneath. While the others walked through the checkpoint like citizens, Six tore the hinge off a waste pipe, got flushed through the city’s sewers like a round through a barrel, hit a wall, stood up covered in other people’s water, and kept going left. He surfaced twice, terrified a sleeping man half to death with the shimmer of his suit, read the back of the Firetemic Tower and found it sealed, and then an armored transport turned into the alley and the arithmetic resolved itself. He was on its roof before the first door finished opening. Two gates later he was inside the restricted garage of the building that holds Peter Goodwin, invisible, alone, seventeen floors below the man who does not know he is coming.
Session 8 — A Crappy Plan Comes Together
The transport did not slow down for the inner garage, and Six rode its roof through the turns with his cheek against the metal, rolling to keep the overhangs off him, because the alternative was being scraped into the concrete like paint. It stopped at a loading dock. Armed men got out. A cargo robot got out. One of the men said something smelled like shit, and Six, folded behind a compactor with the sewer still running out of his suit seals, agreed with him. When the freight elevator opened he went into it invisible, hit the close button, and stood behind the robot in the dark with four guns and nobody looking at him. The car would not move without a code. So he went up through the roof hatch and climbed, and dropped a stun grenade down the shaft behind him as a courtesy.
The tower is concrete between floors and concrete is a material. The axe took him from fifteen to sixteen to seventeen, and he came up through the last one into a room full of dust, overturned desks, dropping shutters, and a rifle already pointed at the hole. There was no version of that arithmetic that involved stopping. He went over the desk and into the man, took the rifle out of his hands with his body, and got his arms around the neck from the front, which is the wrong side and he knew it. Then the guard’s hand went to his belt. Six did not wait to learn what for. The neck went, the man went, and the thing in his fist went off anyway and webbed half the room in polymer. He rolled out of it and the second guard’s grazer found him in the open and put craters in his chest plate that he felt through the suit. Trauma patch. Reach for the dead man’s rifle. Locked to a dead man’s hand. He slung it anyway, because a locked rifle is still a rifle later, and Ronin Sanchez came up through the floor and removed the second guard’s torso from the conversation.
Somebody on the crew’s own channel told them to stay put and not touch their stuff. Six does not have a category for that. He had a window, so he cut it, and climbed the outside of the building by making the handholds himself, glass chip by glass chip, seventeen floors up with the sirens starting somewhere below. Peter Goodwin was on the other side of the last window slamming a dead communicator down and picking it up again. He looked up at a man made of sewage and armor stepping through the glass and offered to double it, whatever it was, and to get her the stuff back, whoever she was. Six filed the words and hit him. The chair upholstery made adequate rope.
He took the stairs the fast way, on the banister, with a corporation strapped to his back, and came off the last turn into the alley as the lights came round the front of the building. The sewer grate was right there. He does not need to be told twice about a sewer. Down in the dark with the crew behind him and a sleeping man on his shoulders, moving toward the pipes that had put him into this city, he was wounded, stinking, hunted, and carrying the job. It was, by every measure he owns, a good night.
Session 9 — Snakes on a Catwalk
The picture the police had of him was one frame, blurred, of a man in full body armor walking a body out of the Firetemic Tower. Rock Lavey read it off the security channels in the dark of the Aethel City Sewers and found that the planetary authorities held no names for the crew. Six went back to the wall. Shackleton Magellan scanned it, found the vibration sensors and the noise sensors, and worked out that the way through was slow and beside a big pipe where the waste flow would cover the sound. Six set the vibro-axe to a low pulse, a toothbrush on its gentlest cycle, and went in through tile, then concrete, then packed earth, with Peter Goodwin dragged in behind him. Rock and Shackleton shored the roof with corrugated sheathing and scrap pipe that somebody else had left in that passage first.
Shackleton went off down the catwalk with a security drone on his heels. Six kept digging. A wire tube came through the wall and gas began to fill the excavation, and he registered it and kept going, because digging was the job. Hours of it. Then the earth turned to concrete under the blade, hard and flat, and he understood the geometry: he had been cutting sideways along the station wall, parallel to the ship, the whole time. He ran the numbers on leaving Rock’s body in the tunnel to buy the time to finish. He decided against it for one reason, that the DNA would trace back to The Albatross. He turned the axe on the concrete itself and cut a round plug out of the cinder block until the battery died, changed the cell, and pushed.
The plug came free in his hand and he caught it before it could hit the floor. On the other side the space beneath the landing platforms held eight federal soldiers, two Dreadnought battle suits, and a maintenance drill boring at a wall a long way off, searching for the tunnel from the other side. He signalled Rock to move slowly and they went out along the conveyor belts to the storage sector and Storage B-342, where Roselyn Monroe stood waiting with a hose and a look of deep exasperation. Six put Goodwin down on a stack of boxes like freight and went outside to be hosed clean. When Leonard Romeijn had loaded Goodwin into a crate and given the crew twenty-four hours to leave his station, Six waited until the man was gone and said the plain thing: that man had put troops and battle suits on them during his own job and been willing to let the job burn. The crew absorbed it in silence. There was nothing to be done about it now and a ship to catch. He wanted to leave the system at once and accepted that the crew needed credits, and when the crew agreed on the safer thousand-credit run to Peric IV D he went aboard with the rest.
Session 10 — Six Shooters and Four Arms
Twenty-four hours of shore leave at Aethel Starport, then six days in the fold. Six cleaned every surface of his armor and turned the cargo bay into a training floor between the pallets. He wanted to know what four arms did in a fight, so he explained tapping out to Ronin Sanchez (“When I hurt you badly enough, you tap me on and I let you up. That won’t happen.”) and found out. Ronin put him on the deck once. Six filed the extra limbs as a genuine tactical problem. At mealtimes he dropped the sealed ration bags in front of the crew and walked away.
At Acheron’s Rest he carried the heaviest pallets off The Albatross by hand while Marlo Petrak worked the jack beside him. He was handed thirty credits, the first money he has held, and spent it the way he had seen it done: two cigars from Bergljot Peric at Peric Provisions, with an attempt at a tip, then moonshine at The Outpost Cantina, every glass set in front of him. He ordered for Ronin and declined to pay for him. Rock Lavey put a pitcher of water on the table and Six drank that too. Back aboard, drunk, he complained loudly about the one mission he never got to finish: being pulled out of the robot fight in the corridor at the Corwin II Subterranean Landing Bay.
He woke without a hangover and ran laps of the colony in full armor, tripping the perimeter sensors and waving at Basanti Eady when she came out to look. Then he collected Marlo for a fun mission, breakfast and whiskey, learned Marlo had gone unpaid, and had Shackleton Magellan fix it. On the road south he was the one who drew the line: “This is not a fun mission. This is a business mission.”
When the transport went into the ditch under the ridge he was out of it before it stopped, rolling, helmet on, axe in hand. He killed one of the twin snipers, ran the other down on foot with Shackleton’s swarm in his helmet, and took him through the vitals with the grazer after three steady seconds of aim. Then he came back down the hill and burned through the man who had hold of Rock (The Rocky Pass Ambush). He put the session’s experience into being faster.
Session 11 — The Cost of a Clone’s Life
He searched the dead of The Rocky Pass Ambush with Rock Lavey and found the same face under every wrapping. He filled in enough of the trench for the transport to cross and the crew drove on. Across the plains the same face worked the mines and the domes in gangs of five and ten, under armed men in vehicles. At the Roberts Estate it unloaded the cargo. Six recorded what he saw, for P.E.T.A..
Asked to leave weapons behind for dinner, he declared the vibro-axe a tool and brought it. In the study he read the plaque under every mounted animal and asked Harding Roberts how each one moved and fought. When the answers turned into hunting stories he said “I do not care.” At table he copied Ronin Sanchez move for move, and handed a crumpled P.E.T.A. pamphlet to each clone butler, who pocketed it and said nothing. Roberts explained them over the meal: bought from Castellan Biodynamics, kept alive by the drug the crew had just delivered, feral when it runs out. Naja Juan said there were two things to do on the moon. Six asked what she charged for one of them. She took him up on it.
Gunfire in the night. He was armed and on his feet before Rock finished waking him, and rode out with Roberts and Shackleton Magellan after the men who had robbed the medical building (The Roberts Estate Storm Raid). Three turns of aim from a bouncing vehicle in the rain, then a burst at a hundred yards that took the rear tire. At forty-four yards he shot the driver, and the vehicle rolled. Roberts called it remarkable. “It was average.” In the morning he found hot running water and used all of it.
Back at Acheron’s Rest he relieved Marlo Petrak of the watch and gave him his share. He posted a letter to P.E.T.A. for two credits (Six - Letter to PETA (The Peric Assets)). At The Krusty Sextant he made certain Aliya Pontecorvo’s cargo was not clones before the crew took it, and when the choice of destination came up, the bioluminescent jellyfish of Katha V decided it. He watched the scanning drone from outside the hull over Peric III. In the jump he offered to teach Rock the pistol.
Session 12 — That Would Be a Mistake
The broadcasts in the Katha System were about jellyfish rights and a lockdown. Six heard the jellyfish. When the crew chose to wait out the lockdown on Katha V, he took 120 credits from Shackleton Magellan, said nothing for them, and asked Marlo Petrak to come.
At the Furosuto Supaia Spaceport gate he declared two pistols and called the vibro-axe a tool. Tools carried a five-credit tax. He declined and kept walking. Alarms, turrets out of the ceiling, a guard promising to fire. Six stopped, turned, and said, “That would be a mistake.” Then he walked back and paid the five credits.
Furosuto Supaia was warm underground and smelled of ocean and guts. Bertha at Big Willie’s Jellyfish Adventure knocked forty credits off because he had his own suit. At Captain Krusty’s he ate a bowl of hot tentacle stew as if it were his last meal and told the whole counter he was enjoying it. He passed the safety drills, shouted at the tourists who were slow at theirs until Bertha begged him to stop, and threw a couple’s luggage out of the bunk he was sharing.
At five in the morning he was on deck. He talked the two deckhands into letting him shovel chum and had to be told, more than once, to slow down and spread it out. They told him the big ones eat anything and have eaten tourists off other boats. After dark the jellyfish came up in every colour. He recorded all of it, craned one out of the water himself, took pictures for every tourist aboard, and stood at the front of the group photo with two thumbs up and a souvenir t-shirt splitting over his armor.
He came ashore with nothing left: a plushie, a tea towel, a child’s t-shirt, a bottle with two tentacles in it, a bumper sticker and a fuzzy jellyfish for the console. At the face scan he watched a hooded woman tap her cheek and become someone else. He sent Marlo on with the bag, switched on the chameleon field, and followed. A man with sugar skulls on his elbows cuffed her to a jeep and drove away. Not his business. He went back to Marlo.
At Chae-gul 147 he and Marlo cleared the hold onto the conveyor in a hurry because Blaise Fabian said to. Eliise Hawkins asked why nobody had waited for her. “Blaise told us to move it all before security showed up.” She took Fabian away and told the crew to stay. Six went outside with the axe and cut both docking locks, then went out again to put the blade through a tracking beacon on the hull (The Chae-gul 147 Breakaway). In the jump he took heads off dummies and pinned pictures of beaches over his bunk.
Session 13 — Albatross Security LLC: The Zenith Job
The rations ran out over Dinon I, and the money had run out before that. Six went looking for work and could not find the job board. Shack found it for him: security contractors wanted, no limit on numbers. That was acceptable. Shack is the crew’s reader. Marlo made them a company, Albatross Security LLC, and told Six to say nothing to anyone outside the crew. Six logged it as an order. It was a clear one. He prefers clear ones.
The taxi to Rangi Station was an open platform, so he stepped out of the airlock and waited for it in vacuum. Vacuum is quiet, and nobody in it asks questions. In the elevator queue were the pensioners from the jellyfish boat, and he greeted every one by name, because he had taken all their photographs: Frederick, Flora, Miriam, Viola, Milang, Bob. He briefed Shack and Marlo on who was seeing whom. This is what people do with each other. He had watched it on the boat, and he was doing it correctly. Viola explained shuffleboard on the way down. He kept the rules.
Dinon I pulls 1.2 gravities, and in full armor he moved slowly. On the monorail every screen was selling something, and he wanted all of it. He tagged each item and sent the list to Shack. No balance. No balance. No balance. Job first. Then the cup.
Outside the Apice Entertainment Building the screen showed Adelina Feliciano, the headliner they were about to be hired to protect, and the woman who changed her face at the scan on Katha V. On Katha V he had decided she was none of his business. Now she was the job. He told the crew. Some of the protesters below the screen wore P.E.T.A. shirts. He knew the logo. The last people he saw wearing it opened his cryo-vault.
In the applicant hall he went to the front of the line, because the best-qualified man belongs at the front, and offered to fight anyone who disagreed, non-lethally. The man there disagreed, and an official sent Six to the back. He worked forward through the crew instead. Ronin stepped aside. Shack tried to give his place away, which is not a contest, so Six made it one and won at thumb-wrestling. Marlo stopped him there. He signed the Apice Security Contract with a six, because it is his name. He kept his own armor and set its display to the Apice Entertainment Security logo. They asked him to take off the jellyfish t-shirt. He did. Then he bought another one, a Zenith Day shirt for two credits.
He found the crew a room at the Perihelion Super 8, twelve credits a night, and watched soap operas on the wall screen. Before the shift he bought a Quarter Hog Burger and curly fries at Denny Burgers, and the meal came with a small pop star. Marlo traded him meat on a stick for the fries. The street food was better. Paul Harrelson gave them the rules of engagement, and Six checked them against every instruction he had been given before and found the places where they disagreed.
On the Meridian Esplanade patrol he saw a figure standing back from a hotel window with something held to its face. He pinged it to the crew and braced his Grazer Rifle on the building. Shack’s swarm found the rifle on the bed. Six had the shot through the wall. Marlo asked, and the answer was stand down. “Mission incomplete.” The figure walked out. He would not have missed. He had obeyed. Both of those are true, and he filed them side by side and kept watching the window (The Esplanade Sniper).
Session 14 — Iced Tea
The patrol picked up where it had stopped. Marlo showed him the buildings a sniper would use, and he logged each one. Then Harrelson called Shack away and Shack handed him the swarm, which was still following the assassin. Six gave it instructions. It did not follow them. It went back to its default programming and came home, and the assassin changed clothes and went underground. Harrelson sent Six back to regular patrol and told him to stay off the bridge into the civilian sector, because the police cover it. He started a second report and listed every time Harrelson had blocked good security, and gave it to Shack. Marlo told Shack to cut most of it.
That evening he took Rock and Marlo to find the pensioners. A scan under a bridge stopped the taxi. He showed the badge, had the police record his weapon exactly, one stun pistol, and explained that the axe is a tool. They wrote it down as a weapon. That is their error. Outside the Ritz-Carlton he made the introductions properly. Sylvie had said she wanted a young man to rock her world, and Rock is a young man named Rock, so he introduced them. He told everyone about Frederick, Flora and Milang, because he had the information and they did not. The couples went quiet. Rock steered him to the widowers, who were going for cocktails.
Paul and Frederick taught him cigars. The first one went into his lungs and he coughed until he could not see. The second one worked. The leaves were Giga-Stalk, and they made his face warm. The drinks were iced tea. He had a great many. At some point Frederick and Milang were not speaking, and he knew exactly what to say to them, every word, in order, the way he had never known it before. He said it. They left together. Then his eyes began to leak and his chest went hot and would not stop, and he told Marlo he was broken. Marlo said it was called the feels and that it meant he had done something right. He accepted the diagnosis. He did not have a better one.
In the morning he had been poisoned. He sat against Rock’s door covered in ash, with two phone numbers on him in lipstick and a receipt down the collar of his armor, and waited for the medic. Rock arrived late, in yesterday’s clothes, examined him and said hangover. The iced tea had alcohol in it. Nobody had told him. He filed this as one of the most important things he has learned. Rock bought him a cure at a smashed drugstore and made him drink orange juice, and he ate a whole tray of bacon while a machine kept refilling the space.
On the second shift the crew made him leave the Grazer Rifle behind, so he went in with the axe and the badge. He pointed out that he is the weapon. Harrelson said tools count as weapons now. After work he took the crew to The Club and paid for everything, and tipped everyone in the building, because he did not know where tipping stops. Near the end the bouncers dragged a man out from behind a curtain, and P.E.T.A. pamphlets went everywhere. He knows that logo. He watched it go past.