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Yup, here we go, a bit more. Sorry it's so erratic, guys. But! The ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
spn_summergen stories are already going up, so if gen is your thing (or you just like good stories) take a look! I can't wait to see mine! (The one written for me, i mean) :)
Also at AO3.
2296 - The Wolf 424 system
...Instruments of deadliest servitude. - William Wordsworth, ‘Temptations from Roman Refinements'
Jared only hit Axis once every eight-week, when he went on mandatory down-time from the mine. He worked the Alvarez, an iridium-heavy planetoid that had been one of the founding mines to make Axis - and the surrounding hive stations, research facilities, and dry docks - a successful commercial venture. At nearly two hundred kilometers, it was a warren of tunnels and pits surrounded by a scaffold of habitats, linked via magnetic elevators to the processing and refining stations. All zero-g, for the most part, so the Company had them on rotation to keep bone and muscle loss to a minimum. And Jared always did what the Company expected, because, after all, they owned him.
Though maybe not as much as they thought.
He’d been years at Salome, first dealing with and recovering from Grimes, and then training to work in the field. He mined, at Alvarez, but he could turn his hand to refining, too, and he’d worked a while at cold-welding before Alvarez, laying down layers of circuitry on the skins of deep-space explorers. He’d done a half-dozen different jobs, adding as many skills - as much knowledge - as he could; learning, day in, and day out, because the Company would let you take any schooling you wanted, learn any trade you could.
Mining - with the looming threats of suffocation, radiation, zero-g wasting and heavy metal poisoning - paid the most. Jared was in debt up to his eyeballs, what with the ANGEL system, the PT, all his schooling…. If he didn’t take the high-risk jobs, he’d be paying it off until he died, and he really didn’t like the thought of that. At Kin-Gin, they’d never owed anybody anything - not until Grimes, not until the end.
Jared shook off the thought of Kin-Gin, and his past, and settled his duffle a little more firmly between his feet. The shuttle to Axis was crowded, as always, and he didn’t fancy it being kicked away from him - lost in the crowd to some light fingers. He had three weeks at Axis, a bunk in the Company barracks and a physio session with a Company doctor. He’d get that out of the way on day one, if he could.
The other thing he had was about six thousand on an anonymous debit card, got in highly illegal ways. The Company banked most of his pay, leaving him a stipend for any extras he might want. A measly one or two hundred a month, scratch barely worth considering. But Jared had skills over and above the ones he’d learned in Company schools.
He could clone almost any card, program readers and reminders to do so much more; could build stills and mini-refineries for a range of illegal and highly dangerous drugs. The Company on the surface was shiny-clean and white, but underneath it were several million indentured ‘employees’ who were all madly doing everything and anything to earn money in the blackest of black markets, in the hopes of winning their freedom sometime before they were too old and used up to enjoy it.
They reached Axis and docked with a minimum of fuss, the pilot at the helm a pretty good one, or at least a sober one. Jared shuffled off with the rest of the crowd, miners in their distinct gear, all of them smudged and smirched with the filth of their trade, too tired or too eager to clean up before departure. ‘Sides, it’d all just get dirty again on the filthy shuttles.
Execs and tourists and the rest of them had nicer shuttles - clean and modern and above all exclusive - so they didn’t have to dirty their fingers or their tailored suits, or their starched-white, Company souls. Miners disembarked at level ten, sliding IDs along the slot, having fingerprints and retinas scanned, collecting mail and Company news bulletins and the latest glossy adverts from all over Axis. Jared sorted through it on his dataspot while he walked, discarding most of it. There were a couple of letters from old, old friends at Salome, hopelessly time-lagged in their long journey, sent over a year ago, though to the spacers on the jump ships, it had only been a month or two. He’d read those later, maybe save them for back on Alvarez, when he was deep in the dark of the mines and desperate for some distraction.
The other thing he kept was an ad. On the face of it, it was for some skin club on Carousel, fast-cut scenes of writhing bodies and sparkling lights, drink prices and services offered scrolling across the bottom in five different languages plus ship-speak and pictographs for the illiterate. The pictographs made Jared grin, until the last one. Two humanoid bodies, one with wings and one with a pointy tail, simulating sex. Devil in the Angel. Jared shut the dataspot down and shoved it into an inner pocket. Things to do, places to be. Get the physio over with, get his weekly drug-dump, get going.
After his physio - fuck, how he hated those - he cleaned up in the barracks’ long rows of showers, sluicing off days of grime and standing for long, long minutes under the hot spray, wallowing. Clean and wrapped up in a couple of towels, he shaved and brushed and got his hair into some kind of order - it was long enough to tie back, now, but he didn’t feel like messing with it.
He dressed in snug, quasi-military trousers with a dull-black stripe down the outside of the black legs, a thin, v-necked navy sweater and his boots. They guy who’d sold ‘em to him called them ‘tanker’ boots, but the only tankers Jared knew about were ice-haulers out in the Belt, and nobody needed boots like these out there. He just liked the look of them - the straps that looped around his ankles and shins, and the steel guards that were sewn into the shanks and lined the soles; they made effective weapons and kept his feet protected.
Dataspot in one of the pockets on his thigh, debit card and ID in an inner one at his waist, impossible to pick, highly illegal Cobra at his ankle, he was ready to go. He rode the mag-lifts up and up, to the top of Axis station, the uppermost three stories. Carousel. There were pressure windows all around, where you could sit and watch the whole system swing by as Axis spun and spun. And, more importantly, there were flops and drink bars, drug bars and restaurants and 3D theatres, clubs and fights and a few virtual stimulation parlors - VStim - where you could play sports or walk ‘picturesque’ hikes. Every entertainment, every vice, every sin was catered to, and all of Carousel was lit up, flashing, roaring wide open with music and voices, laughter and shouts. Bodies in every state of sobriety, intoxication, dress and undress, reeled from door to door, floor to floor, and Jared grinned, threw back his shoulders and strode in.
He loved it here - loved the noise and the glitter, the tacky decorations and flashing signs, the neon and twinkle lights, the greasy, savory, spicy smells of foods from every corner of the known ‘verse. Here you could buy bootleg music, there you could hear it live, and further along were girls and boys and others to sample. There were even some pockets of alien trade; expensive, illicit, for the discerning customer only.
Jared bought a slab of sweet bread that was stuffed with eggs and cheese and synth-meat, a squeeze-bottle of some kind of alcohol-laced juice, and walked on, eating, drinking, watching. He made his way toward the club in the advert, the one called Purgatory, and when he got there, he squeezed out the last of his drink and tossed the bottle, then paid his door-fee with the anonymous card at his waist. The bass-heavy thrum that poured from the open door made his bones sing, and Jared stepped off the concourse and into a solid wall of music. He followed the crowded catwalk around the pit of the dance floor, watching the seethe and ebb of the bodies below him as they leapt and twisted, writhed and shimmied in time. Colored spots and bars of light danced with them, and puffs of scented vapor eddied, confusing to the eye, and Jared blinked and looked away but kept walking, past the bar and the access to the restrooms and on around, to the halfway point. Breathing hard, and a tiny bit wobbly in the knees, because he’d been in zero-g for eight weeks, the not-quite-Earth gravity of Carousel was wearing him out. A cluster of tables and tall stools loomed out of the murk, most of them occupied. A pair of dancers writhed in a cage overhead, Devil and Angel, twisting around each other, androgynous and stained with glittering dyes and sliding light.
Jared ducked under the cage - he was almost too tall to do it comfortably - and headed into the pitch-black shadows beyond. One, two, three steps and he walked through a silencer, the dampening field tickling his skin. He felt like he’d suddenly gone deaf, the absence of the club noise was so profound. A dimly-lit hall stretched ahead, and he walked down it to a pressure door, put out his left hand for a burst of light to scan, pinging off the miniscule chip embedded there, at the top of a bone.
It looked like a fleck of carbon, something his body had sealed over and left when he’d nearly crushed it a year ago, bad day in the mine. In reality, it was ID and passport and a lot of other things, and the door hissed open, allowing Jared to step through to his real destination, headquarters for a group of people who called themselves the Advocatus Diaboli. Jared had been told that meant the ‘Devil’s Advocate’ - Satan to the Company’s ANGEL system. The Devil in the ANGEL.
He slipped inside, into a wide, tall room scattered with desks and chairs, shelves full of printouts and tables full of cobbled together computers and dataspots, none of which were registered. Over a dozen people were already there, and he lifted a hand in greeting as he walked straight to the small medical set-up in the corner. Gazes followed him as he walked, speculative, and the air in the small room seemed to vibrate with an undertone of suppressed excitement. Jared did his best to shrug it off, trying not to let it get to him. It could be good news - but it could be something bad, too. Time enough for that. Doc was over in her corner, seemingly asleep, though Jared knew better. He pulled out a chair and spun it, sitting in it backwards, chest braced against the back. He reached around, hitching his sweater hem up. The drug pack that the Company doctor had attached earlier sat there, mercury-silver bubble atop the ANGEL port in his spine.
“Hey, Doc,” Jared said, and the doctor stirred from her slump in the corner, yawning.
“Hey, Jared. Let’s see, let’s see.” She snapped on gloves and adjusted the glasses perched on her nose. They were sophisticated little scanners, showing her anything from the surface of Jared’s skin to his spinal column to his spleen, if she wanted. She didn’t really need them, though - she just liked to look, she said.
Jared felt her fingertips touching gently around the pack and then the little ticking hiss of the decoupler in her hand as it told the pack to let go. It slid out and off and into Doc’s hand and Jared sat up, tugging his sweater back down and pushing his hands back through his hair.
“Perfect, thank you. How’re you feeling?” Doc asked, sliding the pack into a small, glassine machine that would carefully examine and extract every molocule in the pack.
“A little floaty, actually. Maybe some of it got through?”
“It’s possible.” Doc picked up another little gadget - one Jared had repaired a couple times - and held it out. Jared made a face, but he slid his index finger inside and tried not to wince as a lancet pricked his skin. From the snorting noise the Doc made, he didn’t succeed. The machine hummed happily, drawing a few drops of blood, and Jared tugged his finger free and stuck it in his mouth.
“You’re such a wimp,” Doc said, grinning, and she handed Jared a bright-yellow sucker on a black-and-white striped stick.
“But you’ve got the best ‘I’m sorry’ candy around,” Jared said, grinning back before shoving the sucker into his mouth. It was sour-sweet and very yellow, and it made his tongue tingle a little. Just a touch of ‘dust to give him a little edge. “So what’s the verdict?”
Doc hummed along with her machine, tapping at a holo keypad that shimmered on her table-top, blue eyes seeming to sparkle behind the weirdly refractive lenses of her glasses. Her short, spiky hair was bright red this time, like blood, and she had a new tattoo that climbed up her throat and around the hinges of her jaws, thready lines and arabesques in a vital green.
“Looks like there was a little bleed-through, but not much. Can’t hope for better, really. Can’t make that membrane on your port any thicker or somebody’ll notice. But it was only a couple milligrams, nothing you can’t handle.” She stripped off her gloves and got a fresh pair, tapped a code into a little, locked ‘fridge unit and took out a prepped syringe, a tiny thing the size of her pinky, filled with a pale, almost luminous liquid. Jared resignedly pulled his arm out of his sweater, bunching the fabric around his neck, and Doc took his bicep in her hand, pinched up a bit of muscle on the back and gave it a quick swipe with an alcohol pad. She looked over her glasses at Jared. “You ready?”
“I’m not five,” Jared muttered, but he looked away and didn’t twitch when the short, slender needle slid into his arm. He could feel the drug flowing in, cold burn, and he hissed out a breath between gritted teeth. Doc patted his arm.
“All done.”
“Fucking ow,” Jared muttered. He shoved his arm back into the sweater sleeve and smoothed it down, dragged the sucker across his tongue and out of his mouth, pursing his lips around it. “Thanks, Doc.”
Doc laughed. “Save your skills for the mark, pretty. I’m immune.”
“Like hell,” Jared laughed. But he shoved the candy back between his teeth and got up, heading for the cluster of desks and tables where most of the rest of the people were, barring Jack, who was over in the opposite corner, doing some kind of complicated weapons’ maintenance, and the Jo boys at the security desk, monitoring the club and the surrounds for anything not right. A handful of holos hovered in the center, information and spreadsheets and code whipping by or slowing to a crawl as someone pointed something out to the group, or someone else made a change.
Jared found a chair, a couple people shuffling and making room, and he slumped down, listening with half an ear to the current discussion, something about stocks and indexes and other, incomprehensible money talk. He was more the hands-on guy in this group, though really only three of the dozen or so people there were actually virtual only - most of them got their hands dirty in the real world.
“So, that’s that.” Raleigh tapped a few holos closed and sat back, stretching his back and neck, his hands going to cup the back of his skull as he arched up in his chair. The tape-patched monstrosity groaned in warning, and he slumped back down. “Hey, Jared, good to see you back. We got a job for you.”
“Awesome,” Jared said. He sat up, twirling the candy in his mouth, and Celeste snorted, sipping at a half-empty cup of some kind of coffee drink that was weirdly pale and greenish, but smelled pretty good. “What’s the job?”
“Got a guy we want you to bring in. He’s been here almost two months, landed just after you went out last time.” Raleigh’s voice was casual, but the tension was back, in the tightness of the man’s thin shoulders and the wary little glances Celeste kept giving Jared. Raleigh leaned forward again, bringing up a new holo, this one with several images and a scroll of vital stats. Jared leaned in for a closer look as about half of the others got up, moving away to attend to their own business or check on ongoing jobs, not a few giving him backward glances.
The guy in the images was too thin, but pretty - pretty like a little alley cat, half-starved but still fighting. His long, dark-brown hair curved raggedly around his face and throat, and his eyes were an unexpected green. The images were mostly stills; a couple from when he landed, disembarking from a Company security ship and looking shell-shocked and dazed. A couple more were the man at some kind of dull, cramped work station, presumably a job, and the same guy in an all-night emergency clinic and in the drunk tank and then down in the core, curled into an alcove somewhere, nest of castoffs and trash.
“Well, shit,” Jared said, frowning. “That went fast.”
“Yeah, well.” Raleigh flicked the images back into a folder and dragged out another one. It was the same guy, but he looked younger - at least ten years - with his hair in a buzz-cut, standing under unnaturally bright lights. He had a black eye, a cut on his chin and one on his neck, and what looked like rug burn or a bad scrape on his cheek and jaw. He wore a tattered white tee and dirt, and was holding an intake board. It was a prison shot, and Jared frowned, leaning forward to squint at the date.
“That’s- Hey, wait. No fucking way. It says he was born in 2229. That’s over sixty years ago. The guy’s not that old.”
“Yeah, he is. Kinda. He’s an ArchANGEL. Or he was, up until about six months ago.”
Jared stared at the holo, of a young, battered man with bruised knuckles and dead eyes. He could feel his heart starting to pound, thumping in his chest. “ArchANGELs don’t live that long past mustering out, everybody knows that.” He looked away from the holo, up at Raleigh and Celeste. “We all know that, right? I mean- none of them...have.”
“This one did.” Celeste said, and she was grinning, tight and toothy, patchy flush of excitement staining her cheeks. “We think- Well, obviously, something happened and his ‘net...mutated. It’s working without the packs, but without the viral boost, either. It’s not a hundred percent or anything, but he’s not dead, so….”
“So you want me to bring him in.” Jared dragged the holo closer and flipped back through the other images - the stats and info the Devils had acquired on the guy. If he’d been an ArchANGEL, then...he’d spent most of his time shipboard, jumping from mission to mission, port to port. Living a life of suspended animation, aging at a fraction of the speed of humans who never went Between. Hell, in real-time, he might have only aged a dozen years or so - was still a lot closer to the guy in the last image than he was the guy sleeping in trash. What a head trip.
“Yeah, this guy, we gotta have him. If what we think is true, Jared, he’s the next stage. He’s it. He’s our fucking silver bullet.” Celeste’s voice shook, just a little, but Jared didn’t blame her. He couldn’t quite get a full breath, himself. A working ‘net - without Company drugs. Spontaneous mutation past the blockers and kill switches the Company installed. The things that made you, one hundred percent, dependent on Company drugs and Company doctors and the Company until the day you died, because without the little resets the Company had worked into every drug pack, the ANGEL system would die. Or, at the very least, stop working.
“Fucking...hell,” Jared said, grinning so hard it hurt, and Celeste made an exaggerated ‘oh my god!’ face at him, her hands slapping rapidly down onto her thighs, a jittery crescendo.
“Yeah, he is - or, might be. We gotta know.” Raleigh looked about as excited as mud, but Jared could see the sheen of sweat on his temples, and the way his hands shook, ever so slightly. Keeping it all in check until he was sure, that was Raleigh. “The other thing is, uh….” Raleigh’s gaze flicked around the room and Jared realized everyone was watching, even Doc and the Jo boys.
“Fuck’s sake, what?”
“He’s- He was born shipboard, Jared. On...the Glorianna.”
“No he wasn’t,” Jared said, automatic. And then looked at Raleigh. “Wha-what?” he stuttered, feeling the shock of that information like a dousing of ice water, more of a shock than the thought of a living, ex ArchANGEL. His heart skipped and then slammed into a faster beat, painful in its intensity, and he could feel his breaths shortening, making him lightheaded. The remains of his sucker slipped out of his hand, forgotten.
“Hey, c’mon, take it easy,” Doc said, looming out of nowhere with a little cup of water and a damp fiber towel that she slapped on the back of his neck. Jared took in a hard, unsteady breath and took the water in a shaking hand. “Need a minute?”
“Yeah...no. Fuck no, tell me how...how is that-? How is that...possible?”
“Remember when they found her? I know you’ve read about it. There were kids on that ship already, ones that had survived whatever sent her drifting, and the fire about ten years later. He’s one of them. A survivor. An original. He’s about the only one left.”
“Fuck, holy...fuck.” Jared stared at the too-pretty face, the feral cat’s eyes that promised nothing good if you fucked with him. “He’s not - we’re not - related or, or anything-?”
“No, no. Totally different cell-line. But the markers were there, and the database is online for those that can fiddle it. He’s...one of you.”
Jerad tossed the mouthful of water in the cup down his throat and swallowed, then crumpled the flimsy thing in his fist. His moms had thought they’d picked a donor, and sperm, from a random bank assortment, nothing special, just...what was there. But Jared had found out, at the same time he’d joined the Devils, that the Company had gotten ownership of all the cryo-stored DNA, eggs and sperm that were left in the Glorianna. They’d secured them and hidden them away, and, out of sight and knowledge of the general public and even the government, they’d inserted selected lots of them into donor banks all around the ‘verse, because whatever had made those gene sets special for the Glorianna - whatever had made old Earth choose them over billions - made them special to the Company. Special, different - untouched by all the years of man’s going out into the stars, and changing in ways no one had ever expected. Old stuff, the Glorianna get were. Old, and a little strange, and apparently perfect.
And when those kids were born, one way or another they became Company property. Because the Company wanted lives, needed them, and a creche and children being turned out like so many parts on an assembly line would be just a little too conspicuous. Curing Grimes wasn’t the reason they’d instituted the lottery on Kin-Gin and a dozen other worlds. They had notions, the Company did. They had plans. They wanted bodies to experiment on; they wanted to see just what the ANGEL system could do, unfettered by regulations and government interference, unfettered by families who wondered just what had happened to their sons and daughters. The children of the Glorianna - the Company’s indentured thousands - were orphans. Every last one of them.
Jared took a deep, shaky breath and then he looked up. He gazed around the room for a moment, from this to that look of concern, of curiosity. Then he looked back at Celeste, and then at Raleigh.
“Okay. Okay. Tell me everything, I need to know...everything. He’s mine.”
Part six.
spn_summergen stories are already going up, so if gen is your thing (or you just like good stories) take a look! I can't wait to see mine! (The one written for me, i mean) :)Also at AO3.
2296 - The Wolf 424 system
...Instruments of deadliest servitude. - William Wordsworth, ‘Temptations from Roman Refinements'
Jared only hit Axis once every eight-week, when he went on mandatory down-time from the mine. He worked the Alvarez, an iridium-heavy planetoid that had been one of the founding mines to make Axis - and the surrounding hive stations, research facilities, and dry docks - a successful commercial venture. At nearly two hundred kilometers, it was a warren of tunnels and pits surrounded by a scaffold of habitats, linked via magnetic elevators to the processing and refining stations. All zero-g, for the most part, so the Company had them on rotation to keep bone and muscle loss to a minimum. And Jared always did what the Company expected, because, after all, they owned him.
Though maybe not as much as they thought.
He’d been years at Salome, first dealing with and recovering from Grimes, and then training to work in the field. He mined, at Alvarez, but he could turn his hand to refining, too, and he’d worked a while at cold-welding before Alvarez, laying down layers of circuitry on the skins of deep-space explorers. He’d done a half-dozen different jobs, adding as many skills - as much knowledge - as he could; learning, day in, and day out, because the Company would let you take any schooling you wanted, learn any trade you could.
Mining - with the looming threats of suffocation, radiation, zero-g wasting and heavy metal poisoning - paid the most. Jared was in debt up to his eyeballs, what with the ANGEL system, the PT, all his schooling…. If he didn’t take the high-risk jobs, he’d be paying it off until he died, and he really didn’t like the thought of that. At Kin-Gin, they’d never owed anybody anything - not until Grimes, not until the end.
Jared shook off the thought of Kin-Gin, and his past, and settled his duffle a little more firmly between his feet. The shuttle to Axis was crowded, as always, and he didn’t fancy it being kicked away from him - lost in the crowd to some light fingers. He had three weeks at Axis, a bunk in the Company barracks and a physio session with a Company doctor. He’d get that out of the way on day one, if he could.
The other thing he had was about six thousand on an anonymous debit card, got in highly illegal ways. The Company banked most of his pay, leaving him a stipend for any extras he might want. A measly one or two hundred a month, scratch barely worth considering. But Jared had skills over and above the ones he’d learned in Company schools.
He could clone almost any card, program readers and reminders to do so much more; could build stills and mini-refineries for a range of illegal and highly dangerous drugs. The Company on the surface was shiny-clean and white, but underneath it were several million indentured ‘employees’ who were all madly doing everything and anything to earn money in the blackest of black markets, in the hopes of winning their freedom sometime before they were too old and used up to enjoy it.
They reached Axis and docked with a minimum of fuss, the pilot at the helm a pretty good one, or at least a sober one. Jared shuffled off with the rest of the crowd, miners in their distinct gear, all of them smudged and smirched with the filth of their trade, too tired or too eager to clean up before departure. ‘Sides, it’d all just get dirty again on the filthy shuttles.
Execs and tourists and the rest of them had nicer shuttles - clean and modern and above all exclusive - so they didn’t have to dirty their fingers or their tailored suits, or their starched-white, Company souls. Miners disembarked at level ten, sliding IDs along the slot, having fingerprints and retinas scanned, collecting mail and Company news bulletins and the latest glossy adverts from all over Axis. Jared sorted through it on his dataspot while he walked, discarding most of it. There were a couple of letters from old, old friends at Salome, hopelessly time-lagged in their long journey, sent over a year ago, though to the spacers on the jump ships, it had only been a month or two. He’d read those later, maybe save them for back on Alvarez, when he was deep in the dark of the mines and desperate for some distraction.
The other thing he kept was an ad. On the face of it, it was for some skin club on Carousel, fast-cut scenes of writhing bodies and sparkling lights, drink prices and services offered scrolling across the bottom in five different languages plus ship-speak and pictographs for the illiterate. The pictographs made Jared grin, until the last one. Two humanoid bodies, one with wings and one with a pointy tail, simulating sex. Devil in the Angel. Jared shut the dataspot down and shoved it into an inner pocket. Things to do, places to be. Get the physio over with, get his weekly drug-dump, get going.
After his physio - fuck, how he hated those - he cleaned up in the barracks’ long rows of showers, sluicing off days of grime and standing for long, long minutes under the hot spray, wallowing. Clean and wrapped up in a couple of towels, he shaved and brushed and got his hair into some kind of order - it was long enough to tie back, now, but he didn’t feel like messing with it.
He dressed in snug, quasi-military trousers with a dull-black stripe down the outside of the black legs, a thin, v-necked navy sweater and his boots. They guy who’d sold ‘em to him called them ‘tanker’ boots, but the only tankers Jared knew about were ice-haulers out in the Belt, and nobody needed boots like these out there. He just liked the look of them - the straps that looped around his ankles and shins, and the steel guards that were sewn into the shanks and lined the soles; they made effective weapons and kept his feet protected.
Dataspot in one of the pockets on his thigh, debit card and ID in an inner one at his waist, impossible to pick, highly illegal Cobra at his ankle, he was ready to go. He rode the mag-lifts up and up, to the top of Axis station, the uppermost three stories. Carousel. There were pressure windows all around, where you could sit and watch the whole system swing by as Axis spun and spun. And, more importantly, there were flops and drink bars, drug bars and restaurants and 3D theatres, clubs and fights and a few virtual stimulation parlors - VStim - where you could play sports or walk ‘picturesque’ hikes. Every entertainment, every vice, every sin was catered to, and all of Carousel was lit up, flashing, roaring wide open with music and voices, laughter and shouts. Bodies in every state of sobriety, intoxication, dress and undress, reeled from door to door, floor to floor, and Jared grinned, threw back his shoulders and strode in.
He loved it here - loved the noise and the glitter, the tacky decorations and flashing signs, the neon and twinkle lights, the greasy, savory, spicy smells of foods from every corner of the known ‘verse. Here you could buy bootleg music, there you could hear it live, and further along were girls and boys and others to sample. There were even some pockets of alien trade; expensive, illicit, for the discerning customer only.
Jared bought a slab of sweet bread that was stuffed with eggs and cheese and synth-meat, a squeeze-bottle of some kind of alcohol-laced juice, and walked on, eating, drinking, watching. He made his way toward the club in the advert, the one called Purgatory, and when he got there, he squeezed out the last of his drink and tossed the bottle, then paid his door-fee with the anonymous card at his waist. The bass-heavy thrum that poured from the open door made his bones sing, and Jared stepped off the concourse and into a solid wall of music. He followed the crowded catwalk around the pit of the dance floor, watching the seethe and ebb of the bodies below him as they leapt and twisted, writhed and shimmied in time. Colored spots and bars of light danced with them, and puffs of scented vapor eddied, confusing to the eye, and Jared blinked and looked away but kept walking, past the bar and the access to the restrooms and on around, to the halfway point. Breathing hard, and a tiny bit wobbly in the knees, because he’d been in zero-g for eight weeks, the not-quite-Earth gravity of Carousel was wearing him out. A cluster of tables and tall stools loomed out of the murk, most of them occupied. A pair of dancers writhed in a cage overhead, Devil and Angel, twisting around each other, androgynous and stained with glittering dyes and sliding light.
Jared ducked under the cage - he was almost too tall to do it comfortably - and headed into the pitch-black shadows beyond. One, two, three steps and he walked through a silencer, the dampening field tickling his skin. He felt like he’d suddenly gone deaf, the absence of the club noise was so profound. A dimly-lit hall stretched ahead, and he walked down it to a pressure door, put out his left hand for a burst of light to scan, pinging off the miniscule chip embedded there, at the top of a bone.
It looked like a fleck of carbon, something his body had sealed over and left when he’d nearly crushed it a year ago, bad day in the mine. In reality, it was ID and passport and a lot of other things, and the door hissed open, allowing Jared to step through to his real destination, headquarters for a group of people who called themselves the Advocatus Diaboli. Jared had been told that meant the ‘Devil’s Advocate’ - Satan to the Company’s ANGEL system. The Devil in the ANGEL.
He slipped inside, into a wide, tall room scattered with desks and chairs, shelves full of printouts and tables full of cobbled together computers and dataspots, none of which were registered. Over a dozen people were already there, and he lifted a hand in greeting as he walked straight to the small medical set-up in the corner. Gazes followed him as he walked, speculative, and the air in the small room seemed to vibrate with an undertone of suppressed excitement. Jared did his best to shrug it off, trying not to let it get to him. It could be good news - but it could be something bad, too. Time enough for that. Doc was over in her corner, seemingly asleep, though Jared knew better. He pulled out a chair and spun it, sitting in it backwards, chest braced against the back. He reached around, hitching his sweater hem up. The drug pack that the Company doctor had attached earlier sat there, mercury-silver bubble atop the ANGEL port in his spine.
“Hey, Doc,” Jared said, and the doctor stirred from her slump in the corner, yawning.
“Hey, Jared. Let’s see, let’s see.” She snapped on gloves and adjusted the glasses perched on her nose. They were sophisticated little scanners, showing her anything from the surface of Jared’s skin to his spinal column to his spleen, if she wanted. She didn’t really need them, though - she just liked to look, she said.
Jared felt her fingertips touching gently around the pack and then the little ticking hiss of the decoupler in her hand as it told the pack to let go. It slid out and off and into Doc’s hand and Jared sat up, tugging his sweater back down and pushing his hands back through his hair.
“Perfect, thank you. How’re you feeling?” Doc asked, sliding the pack into a small, glassine machine that would carefully examine and extract every molocule in the pack.
“A little floaty, actually. Maybe some of it got through?”
“It’s possible.” Doc picked up another little gadget - one Jared had repaired a couple times - and held it out. Jared made a face, but he slid his index finger inside and tried not to wince as a lancet pricked his skin. From the snorting noise the Doc made, he didn’t succeed. The machine hummed happily, drawing a few drops of blood, and Jared tugged his finger free and stuck it in his mouth.
“You’re such a wimp,” Doc said, grinning, and she handed Jared a bright-yellow sucker on a black-and-white striped stick.
“But you’ve got the best ‘I’m sorry’ candy around,” Jared said, grinning back before shoving the sucker into his mouth. It was sour-sweet and very yellow, and it made his tongue tingle a little. Just a touch of ‘dust to give him a little edge. “So what’s the verdict?”
Doc hummed along with her machine, tapping at a holo keypad that shimmered on her table-top, blue eyes seeming to sparkle behind the weirdly refractive lenses of her glasses. Her short, spiky hair was bright red this time, like blood, and she had a new tattoo that climbed up her throat and around the hinges of her jaws, thready lines and arabesques in a vital green.
“Looks like there was a little bleed-through, but not much. Can’t hope for better, really. Can’t make that membrane on your port any thicker or somebody’ll notice. But it was only a couple milligrams, nothing you can’t handle.” She stripped off her gloves and got a fresh pair, tapped a code into a little, locked ‘fridge unit and took out a prepped syringe, a tiny thing the size of her pinky, filled with a pale, almost luminous liquid. Jared resignedly pulled his arm out of his sweater, bunching the fabric around his neck, and Doc took his bicep in her hand, pinched up a bit of muscle on the back and gave it a quick swipe with an alcohol pad. She looked over her glasses at Jared. “You ready?”
“I’m not five,” Jared muttered, but he looked away and didn’t twitch when the short, slender needle slid into his arm. He could feel the drug flowing in, cold burn, and he hissed out a breath between gritted teeth. Doc patted his arm.
“All done.”
“Fucking ow,” Jared muttered. He shoved his arm back into the sweater sleeve and smoothed it down, dragged the sucker across his tongue and out of his mouth, pursing his lips around it. “Thanks, Doc.”
Doc laughed. “Save your skills for the mark, pretty. I’m immune.”
“Like hell,” Jared laughed. But he shoved the candy back between his teeth and got up, heading for the cluster of desks and tables where most of the rest of the people were, barring Jack, who was over in the opposite corner, doing some kind of complicated weapons’ maintenance, and the Jo boys at the security desk, monitoring the club and the surrounds for anything not right. A handful of holos hovered in the center, information and spreadsheets and code whipping by or slowing to a crawl as someone pointed something out to the group, or someone else made a change.
Jared found a chair, a couple people shuffling and making room, and he slumped down, listening with half an ear to the current discussion, something about stocks and indexes and other, incomprehensible money talk. He was more the hands-on guy in this group, though really only three of the dozen or so people there were actually virtual only - most of them got their hands dirty in the real world.
“So, that’s that.” Raleigh tapped a few holos closed and sat back, stretching his back and neck, his hands going to cup the back of his skull as he arched up in his chair. The tape-patched monstrosity groaned in warning, and he slumped back down. “Hey, Jared, good to see you back. We got a job for you.”
“Awesome,” Jared said. He sat up, twirling the candy in his mouth, and Celeste snorted, sipping at a half-empty cup of some kind of coffee drink that was weirdly pale and greenish, but smelled pretty good. “What’s the job?”
“Got a guy we want you to bring in. He’s been here almost two months, landed just after you went out last time.” Raleigh’s voice was casual, but the tension was back, in the tightness of the man’s thin shoulders and the wary little glances Celeste kept giving Jared. Raleigh leaned forward again, bringing up a new holo, this one with several images and a scroll of vital stats. Jared leaned in for a closer look as about half of the others got up, moving away to attend to their own business or check on ongoing jobs, not a few giving him backward glances.
The guy in the images was too thin, but pretty - pretty like a little alley cat, half-starved but still fighting. His long, dark-brown hair curved raggedly around his face and throat, and his eyes were an unexpected green. The images were mostly stills; a couple from when he landed, disembarking from a Company security ship and looking shell-shocked and dazed. A couple more were the man at some kind of dull, cramped work station, presumably a job, and the same guy in an all-night emergency clinic and in the drunk tank and then down in the core, curled into an alcove somewhere, nest of castoffs and trash.
“Well, shit,” Jared said, frowning. “That went fast.”
“Yeah, well.” Raleigh flicked the images back into a folder and dragged out another one. It was the same guy, but he looked younger - at least ten years - with his hair in a buzz-cut, standing under unnaturally bright lights. He had a black eye, a cut on his chin and one on his neck, and what looked like rug burn or a bad scrape on his cheek and jaw. He wore a tattered white tee and dirt, and was holding an intake board. It was a prison shot, and Jared frowned, leaning forward to squint at the date.
“That’s- Hey, wait. No fucking way. It says he was born in 2229. That’s over sixty years ago. The guy’s not that old.”
“Yeah, he is. Kinda. He’s an ArchANGEL. Or he was, up until about six months ago.”
Jared stared at the holo, of a young, battered man with bruised knuckles and dead eyes. He could feel his heart starting to pound, thumping in his chest. “ArchANGELs don’t live that long past mustering out, everybody knows that.” He looked away from the holo, up at Raleigh and Celeste. “We all know that, right? I mean- none of them...have.”
“This one did.” Celeste said, and she was grinning, tight and toothy, patchy flush of excitement staining her cheeks. “We think- Well, obviously, something happened and his ‘net...mutated. It’s working without the packs, but without the viral boost, either. It’s not a hundred percent or anything, but he’s not dead, so….”
“So you want me to bring him in.” Jared dragged the holo closer and flipped back through the other images - the stats and info the Devils had acquired on the guy. If he’d been an ArchANGEL, then...he’d spent most of his time shipboard, jumping from mission to mission, port to port. Living a life of suspended animation, aging at a fraction of the speed of humans who never went Between. Hell, in real-time, he might have only aged a dozen years or so - was still a lot closer to the guy in the last image than he was the guy sleeping in trash. What a head trip.
“Yeah, this guy, we gotta have him. If what we think is true, Jared, he’s the next stage. He’s it. He’s our fucking silver bullet.” Celeste’s voice shook, just a little, but Jared didn’t blame her. He couldn’t quite get a full breath, himself. A working ‘net - without Company drugs. Spontaneous mutation past the blockers and kill switches the Company installed. The things that made you, one hundred percent, dependent on Company drugs and Company doctors and the Company until the day you died, because without the little resets the Company had worked into every drug pack, the ANGEL system would die. Or, at the very least, stop working.
“Fucking...hell,” Jared said, grinning so hard it hurt, and Celeste made an exaggerated ‘oh my god!’ face at him, her hands slapping rapidly down onto her thighs, a jittery crescendo.
“Yeah, he is - or, might be. We gotta know.” Raleigh looked about as excited as mud, but Jared could see the sheen of sweat on his temples, and the way his hands shook, ever so slightly. Keeping it all in check until he was sure, that was Raleigh. “The other thing is, uh….” Raleigh’s gaze flicked around the room and Jared realized everyone was watching, even Doc and the Jo boys.
“Fuck’s sake, what?”
“He’s- He was born shipboard, Jared. On...the Glorianna.”
“No he wasn’t,” Jared said, automatic. And then looked at Raleigh. “Wha-what?” he stuttered, feeling the shock of that information like a dousing of ice water, more of a shock than the thought of a living, ex ArchANGEL. His heart skipped and then slammed into a faster beat, painful in its intensity, and he could feel his breaths shortening, making him lightheaded. The remains of his sucker slipped out of his hand, forgotten.
“Hey, c’mon, take it easy,” Doc said, looming out of nowhere with a little cup of water and a damp fiber towel that she slapped on the back of his neck. Jared took in a hard, unsteady breath and took the water in a shaking hand. “Need a minute?”
“Yeah...no. Fuck no, tell me how...how is that-? How is that...possible?”
“Remember when they found her? I know you’ve read about it. There were kids on that ship already, ones that had survived whatever sent her drifting, and the fire about ten years later. He’s one of them. A survivor. An original. He’s about the only one left.”
“Fuck, holy...fuck.” Jared stared at the too-pretty face, the feral cat’s eyes that promised nothing good if you fucked with him. “He’s not - we’re not - related or, or anything-?”
“No, no. Totally different cell-line. But the markers were there, and the database is online for those that can fiddle it. He’s...one of you.”
Jerad tossed the mouthful of water in the cup down his throat and swallowed, then crumpled the flimsy thing in his fist. His moms had thought they’d picked a donor, and sperm, from a random bank assortment, nothing special, just...what was there. But Jared had found out, at the same time he’d joined the Devils, that the Company had gotten ownership of all the cryo-stored DNA, eggs and sperm that were left in the Glorianna. They’d secured them and hidden them away, and, out of sight and knowledge of the general public and even the government, they’d inserted selected lots of them into donor banks all around the ‘verse, because whatever had made those gene sets special for the Glorianna - whatever had made old Earth choose them over billions - made them special to the Company. Special, different - untouched by all the years of man’s going out into the stars, and changing in ways no one had ever expected. Old stuff, the Glorianna get were. Old, and a little strange, and apparently perfect.
And when those kids were born, one way or another they became Company property. Because the Company wanted lives, needed them, and a creche and children being turned out like so many parts on an assembly line would be just a little too conspicuous. Curing Grimes wasn’t the reason they’d instituted the lottery on Kin-Gin and a dozen other worlds. They had notions, the Company did. They had plans. They wanted bodies to experiment on; they wanted to see just what the ANGEL system could do, unfettered by regulations and government interference, unfettered by families who wondered just what had happened to their sons and daughters. The children of the Glorianna - the Company’s indentured thousands - were orphans. Every last one of them.
Jared took a deep, shaky breath and then he looked up. He gazed around the room for a moment, from this to that look of concern, of curiosity. Then he looked back at Celeste, and then at Raleigh.
“Okay. Okay. Tell me everything, I need to know...everything. He’s mine.”
Part six.
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