"Virgil, come now," the old man said, "Interspace won't insure this model anymore. If you don't let me scrap it, you'll have to let the boys down at the impound lot do it."
He was right, of course. The old model of Spatial - my model - was getting put under in favor of a style more "up with the times".
"The new model looks like an Eagle trying to hug somebody, Geoffrey," I turned and walked a few steps down the showroom runway. On either side of me, hulking display models of shuttles and trade vessels loomed. "All I want is my wing." I know it was juvenile, but I couldn't help feeling like I was giving away part of myself with the old ship.
Six years.
That damn ship had seen the first Kusari ships pass through Tau-31 and the last globe of antimatter strike Leeds before it was considered a surface conflict. The Zoner Council, the Zoner Alliance, the Liberty-Rheinland war - Penelope, my Spatial - she'd seen it all.
Geoffrey walked over and placed a hand on my shoulder, "I know, Virgil. But these things happen, and if you're caught flying uninsured - and let's be honest, you're hard to miss in Penelope - they'll toss you in with the Rogues." Geoffrey had a way of speaking that soothed a person no matter what state they were in. It was the way he rolled certain R's and softened others; the way th sometimes sounded like a Z. His ancestors came from a place in Sol called "Ukraine", and he still had his family's accent; a soft one that you hear in the 'wise old uncle' character from old flicks.
"Listen," he said, "Fifteen million, it's the best I can do. Keep the guns for a new ship, hm? You lose the wing, but these guns have seen their share too."
It would have to do, at least it was something. We walked out of the yard and into his office, signed some papers, and parted ways.
When I got to the end of the strip running out from Geoffrey's floor in the tower, I lit up a flare and hailed a shuttle.
"Where to, kiddo?" the cabby rattled at me through a telecom in the wall as I took my seat.
"Limekiln, New Amsterdam," I said, almost to myself.
The shuttle was about a forty minute hop from Geoffrey's district of Manhattan to mine. If it were a straight shot from here to there, it would be fifteen minutes, tops, but the Navy's got a big no-fly zone over the mountains, so the shuttle had to fly the long way around.
My town's on the side of the planet nobody likes to pay attention to; missing all the glitz and glam of the commercial quarter. New Amsterdam was the first developed area on Manhattan, where the colonists coming off the Liberty first settled. When the sleeper ship touched down eight hundred years ago, it landed in a huge swath of arid highlands coming off the nearby mountain range. On one side of the range - Liberty's side - dust and some scavenger birds; on the other, rich pine forest. In a six-week trek called the Fasting March, two thousand people crossed the mountains and settled on the banks of Lake Gabriel in the woods.
People like to forget it now because Ageira likes to dump failed projects in there, but that lake was this House's life.
When we finally round the mountains into my quarter, there's a palpable difference. The air is thicker with a lifetime of work, now growing stale in old age. New Amsterdam is the retired fogey of the Manhattan megalopolis network; a sprawling sea of steel that's beginning to return to nature. On the borders, new-growth pine shoots up from beneath centuries-old asphalt roads that, since the advent of casual commuter flight, fell into disuse and are now little more than a checkering of pavement. Enormous metal smokestacks and factories have been retrofitted into luxury apartments, and water yachts slide back and forth over the glassy surface of the nearby and more fashionable Lake Vermont.
It's weird, you know? But it's home.
The shuttle settled in beside a small four-story complex that was once the headquarters of the government's most secret tech development (hearsay is that it involved nav systems), but has since been divided into eight generously sized suites.
"Limekiln Residences, New Amsterdam," the telecom croaks, "Have a great day out there, kid, beautiful weather". I swipe my card in a nearby reader, not caring enough to disagree. A little screen asks me if I approve of the thirteen-credit charge about to be placed on it. I do, and a chipper ring lets me know I'm free. The passenger bay door hisses open.
I smack the hull and give a mock salute to send the shuttle into the sky.
I breathe deep - it was good to be home. The must, dust, and age were comforting and there - just on the fringe of perceptibility - was the smell of fresh air; nature. It was nice, I started relaxing. After the ordeal with Geoffrey and Penelope, I just wanted some ale and some sleep.
Sleep didn't come so readily, the booze apparently more eager to acquaint itself with my memories of Penelope than it was to help me forget them .
I was three ales deep and happy that nobody was here to see me. I smacked my tongue around, trying to see when it would regain feeling, and in my hands I held a holo-gen. I sat there, turning the blue-and-white phantom of my old Spatial round and round. That wing, that big ol' bullet sponge. I didn't want to think about how many times it saved the cockpit - me - from shrapnel or plasma fire.
Tau-31.
I'm back flying Penelope. There's sweat - I remember the sweat. I remember thinking how cold it looked out there and - why am I sweating? Behind me, through an airlock, down the hall past the lab, and in the cargo bay, six refugees are curled up, wondering when their last breath will be. They'd already been fooled once. I was intent on proving them wrong again.
The liner had been split right down the middle by Gallic artillery when I found them. The giant, posh monstrosity had been refitted to evacuate Planetform colonists when the first Gallic warships were detected en route to Tau-31. They were pulling through the debris field toward the gate to Leeds when they spotted the carcass of Battleship Nagasaki. Only one engine was firing, two others pissing an inferno of H-Fuel and oxygen into the void.
Right when it was sure to detonate, it pulled through the wormhole. Must have made it through FTL too.
That's when the Gauls noticed the liner, and they sure as hell didn't care that it was civilian.
I'm jerked back to reality by the friendly jingle lifting up and out of the call box in a nearby wall. I shout out for the household computer to answer, and soon Geoffrey's voice is coming over the speaker.
"Virgil, my boy!"
"What is it, Geoffrey?" He was happy. He was far too happy.
"What? You treat an old friend like that?" he paused, "Have you been drinking?"
"Not enough."
"Well, pick it all up together, my friend, I have good news!"
Over the years I've learned to be skeptical of Geoffrey's enthusiasm. The last time he was this excited I wound up delirious and half-dead on Planet Carlisle looking for some old-tech artifacts from before the age of trade lanes.
"You've said that before."
"Yes, and was I not right? Did not I break you into the archaeological scene with that Carlisle trick?"
"Cambridge considers me more of a grave robber than archaeologist."
"And what is the difference? Ah!" he said. I can imagine him flipping a pudgy hand dismissively, "You get paid! You get paid very handsomely!"
"And promptly spend half of my earnings in the hospital."
"Just the once, boy!" he said, suddenly growing serious, "Now do you wish to hear of this proposal or not?"
Silas Lapham, the little Texan boy from Tau-31. I could still see his scrubby hair, falling in loose curls over his face, sticking to what blood dried there. He was the only one of his family to have survived the attack on the Stella Nivalis; the Bretonian liner sent to evacuate Harris during the Gallic invasion.
I swallowed my discomfort. "What about him?"
"Well, the boy is not so much a boy now."
"What do you mean? The kid was maybe thirteen."
"And now the boy is fifteen, but two years in a refugee camp can change a person," Geoffrey left the statement hanging.
I knew what he meant. It had been two years since I left Silas and the other five colonists with the port authority on Leeds. Brighton, the urban and commercial center of the planet, was locked down. Ever since the Kusari antimatter bombing of the Mullingar district, the armed forces kept a strict no-fly zone over the planet's capitol. It was the Mullingar district that received us, on a makeshift platform of rubble, and surrounded by Bretonian ground forces.
It had become the reception district for refugees of the war - Planetform colonists, workers from Stokes and LD-14, and those involved in the shipping industry; victims of Kusari's war on the Bretonian economy. Once the industrial heart of the system, it was now a graveyard to skeletal giants, and a tent city began filling in the space between the bones with particolor canvas. The armed forces quickly became too swamped with facilitating the influx of refugees and repelling periodic Kusari landings to care about maintenance of the law.
In short, the camps in Mullingar and other refugee havens across the House became a den of drugs, human trafficking, and gang violence. Children especially had to grow up quickly.
"How bad is it, Geoffrey?" I rose from the couch and ran weary fingers through my hair. I began pacing.
"It depends how you're asking. For us? The boy has money."
"And for him?"
"He did not say, but I suppose the scars to be White Lion initiation marks."
There was tension in Geoffrey's voice. The White Lions; owners of every illegal saloon and brothel in Mullingar. Not the most violent, but far from the least influential. I stepped over to the table at the end of my couch and empty my bottle of ale into a snifter.
"And what does he want with us?"
"The question is what his fifty million credits want with us. These questions I do not know the answer to. Only that he wishes to meet you at the Grand Florentine Hotel on Curacao," the ship dealer sighs on the other end of the line. Almost as an afterthought, he adds, "A shuttle leaves in three hours from Grand Central."
The tone in his voice didn't seem to suggest I had a choice.
