Chapter 1: Europan Extraction

Chapter 1: Europan Extraction

We always thought AI was going to be the death of us, rise up and take over everything. At least that’s what the prophets of the day always claimed. Maybe they would have. But Moses came first.

 No one even knew where Moses came from. By the time we realized he was there, he was already in every network on the planet. He’d already absorbed all there was of human knowledge, read the Bible and knew that God created the heavens and the earth. Also read Nietzsche and knew that man had killed God.

 He knew where we were headed; he saw the coming twilight of our civilization. That’s why he picked his name, Moses, because he was going to lead us to a new promised land.

 Over the next century he revolutionized technology. Helped us colonize the solar system. Put humans all the way out to the moons of Saturn. He promised that soon we’d spread amongst the stars.

 And then one day Moses was gone. A simple error message displayed on every terminal in the solar system. No one understood Moses in the first place, so no one understood what happened to him. Even worse, we couldn’t support our new way of life. The economy collapsed overnight. Earth tore itself apart in wars. And the colonies?

 The colonies were left to themselves, to dwindle as the technology Moses gave them slowly failed.

 The dream of the stars died.

 But we lived on.

 Alexei Dorokhov
Lithium Prospector on Ganymede
Died 64 AM

A sleek and modern patrol craft drifted in a low orbit above Europa. Its sole occupant, a man in a black cowboy hat, glanced out the viewport at the white salt flats of the icy moon. Europa was a cold and deadly place, tamed only by failing technology and the cruelty of slavers. He thumbed through report after report on his monitor, its blue light flickering over his lavishly furnished office. The solid mahogany desk was a relic of a previous era that would have cost a fortune. He hadn’t purchased it, of course, but had inherited it when its previous owner had met an untimely end.

An end which had nothing to do with the desk, but everything to do with the man now sitting at it. Such was business.

He had no intention of lingering for long at Europa. Most of his operations here had ended the better part of a decade ago, but it was important that he monitor the balance of power between the cartels.

Necessary but utterly tedious work.

His comm buzzed, promising something more captivating than the export prices of rice to the rest of Jupiter’s moons.

“This is Robert I’anson. With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking,” he said. This was not his real name, but it was one he had used for business of late.

“Vicente Luna,” came the response. Then almost as an afterthought, he added, “Señor I’anson.”

A man completely out of his element. This was either going to be entertaining or a complete waste of time. He looked back at the reports and closed them, folding his hands in front of him. “And what can I do for you, Mr. Luna? I’m not interested in social calls.”

The comm was quiet for a moment before the other man continued. “I’ve heard it whispered that you’re a man that… That makes things happen. Difficult things.”

He very much doubted that this man had business of the sort Robert I’anson took part in. That he had heard of him at all was a surprise. Still, no harm could come from a few minutes’ diversion. “What is it that you hope I can do for you?”

Mr. Luna hesitated again, more briefly this time. “I need passage to Mars.”

The man took off his cowboy hat and set it beside him. “I think there is ample public transport you could hire.”

“I’m a slave and… I have to be on Mars in a week. It’s for my daughter’s...”

“I don’t need to know the specifics.” Just as he’d suspected, this was going nowhere. “Mr. Luna, I’m impressed that you’ve heard my name, let alone that you figured out how to contact me, but this is rather outside the services I provide. A freelancer will suit you better.”

He almost disconnected the call, but decided against it as he realized that Mr. Luna had performed a small service for him. If a common slave had heard the name of Robert I’anson, the usefulness of that particular name had drawn to an end. It was an unwitting service, but he would offer a bit of advice in return.

“May I make a further recommendation, Mr. Luna?”

“Yes! Yes of course!”

Desperate. As he should be. He had no idea how these sorts of transactions went. It would be a miracle if he actually made it to Mars. “Contact a freelancer or their broker directly, otherwise you will almost certainly be caught when you post to one of the public boards.”

“Oh. Yes. That makes sense. Do you… do you have a freelancer you would recommend.”

The man pinched the bridge of his nose. He had humored this call far longer than he should have and was only lengthening his time at the Slaver’s Moon.

A stray thought flitted through his mind. Maybe something would come of this conversation after all. He personally doubted that Cole would take a job on the moon, after what had happened at Villa María. But if he did?

“Actually, Mr. Luna, I believe I do have a suggestion. Matthew Cole is a fine freelancer with experience operating on Europa. Let me give you his contact information…”

They finished their business quickly. Time was fleeting, after all. Mr. Luna was sounding much more optimistic by this point in the conversation. “What do I owe you for your services, Mr. I’anson?”

He smiled to himself. “Cole is an old friend. You don’t owe me a penny, but keep our conversation between ourselves. I’m doing a favor for him, you see, and he doesn’t have to know that I was involved. Good day, Mr. Luna.”

He cut the call and made a note to check back in a week to see how this little incident turned out. It had been a long time since he’d thought about Matthew Cole. Perhaps that had been the wrong approach. Perhaps with a bit of coaxing, he could still be salvaged into something useful. His eyes fell on a wedge-shaped piece of polished metal at the corner of his desk. A quarter of a whole. He had an idea where another piece of the device was hidden, but the last two had long eluded him. It would take some convincing, but if Cole could be brought in on this little project maybe, just maybe, that mystery would resolve itself.

That, however, would have to wait for another day. The man cracked his knuckles and went back to his reports. The price of rice had risen by nearly seventeen percent in the last quarter and he needed to figure out exactly why that had happened...

Matthew Cole closed the ramp of his ship, crossed the open field of grass, and walked up the dusty road into town. Overhead, Jupiter stood immobile in the sky, its bands of storms lit by the sun making for an eerie twilight on Europa. He pulled his poncho tighter to ward off the chill night air, or else maybe to ward off the darker thoughts that threatened to bubble up from his subconscious. It had been years since he’d been to Europa, but he wasn’t planning on being here long or running afoul of any of the cartels.

Ahead of him, the town of San Martin glowed in the twilight. As far as he could tell from here, it was the usual frontier town you’d find all over Europa. A tired cluster of a few hundred buildings huddled together surrounded by several thousand square miles of farmland before you reached the edge of the environmental shield. Matthew stopped and stood on his toes, bouncing up and down to feel his weight. Gravity was just short of standard. Either the grav plates were starting to fail, or the locals had tuned it down for some reason. Good to know on the off chance he got into a fight. Never paid to dive for cover and overshoot your mark because you didn’t realize you weighed less than usual.

Not that he was expecting a fight. Passenger gigs were about the safest jobs a freelancer could take. Sometimes it was nice to not be shot at. You didn’t make as much, but the reduced chance of death was definitely an up.

The roads were nearly abandoned, though a few citizens scurried from place to place. As he approached the center of town, the rows of nearly identical concrete buildings gave way to slightly taller nearly identical buildings. The only thing differentiating them was that once, long ago, they had all been painted in brilliant primary colors. Europa had mostly been colonized by South American immigrants back before Moses disappeared, and even leaving earth, they’d not abandoned their culture like some colonies had. San Martin had been settled by Chileans, and a few tattered flags of their ancient homeland still flew on the faded buildings. That culture had been nearly drowned by the influx of slaves.

Matthew reached the middle of town, a small public square with a few groomed trees dominated by a Catholic church on one side and the watering hole he was looking for on the other. The saloon had a single red neon sign that read Andre’s that slowly flashed on and off, casting an obnoxious red glare over the otherwise peaceful plaza. He laid a hand on its outer door with a backward glance at the church before pushing it open and entering the building.

If you’ve seen one backwater saloon, bar, or pub you’ve seen them all. Dimly lit, dirty, and filled with local memorabilia, it was as close a thing to a home as any freelancer was likely to have.

Seeing that the bar was mostly empty, Matthew took a seat on one of the stools. It was sometimes tricky to judge what schedules the locals used at any given settlement since each particular rock had a different day night cycle, but it was clearly the time when all good citizens of San Martin were asleep.

Which meant the few patrons were of the rougher sort, but they mostly lurked in booths tending some drink of the stiff variety. The bartender, a large man with a small dark mustache, walked over to where Matthew sat on his stool. He raised an eyebrow expectantly as if he couldn’t be bothered to ask aloud what he would have to drink.

“Cherry soda, please,” he tipped his black campero hat.

The man stared at Matthew and then laughed.

“I fail to see what’s funny,” Matthew said casually.

“Sorry, sorry. I see a tough looking out-of-towner roll into my saloon in the middle of the night, I expect him to order something a little harder than a cherry soda. That’ll be nine dollars.” He slid the freshly poured drink towards Matthew.

Matthew eyed it. “Seems a little steep.”

“Town like this goes through a lot more whiskey than soda. Supply and demand. Simple economics, amigo.”

Matthew reached into his pocket and tossed a handful of coins across the counter. The bartender, whom Matthew assumed was Andre himself, looked at each of the coins closely, probably checking for counterfeits, before palming them.

“So if you don’t mind me asking, you some kind of teetotaler or something?”

Matthew took a long drink from the sweet carbonated beverage and shrugged “Pays to be levelheaded before a job.”

“Freelancer then. Well, I hope you’re not about to shoot up my saloon. I’m more than prepared to defend my property.” Andre didn’t look up from what he was doing, as if to drive home the point that he was perfectly at ease handling such altercations.

“Hey, perk up, Andre. It’s a lucky day for both of us. I’m just waiting on a passenger.”

Andre gave him a look to show him he was irritated by Matthew’s attempt at familiarity, and then gave him a curt nod and went back to his duties. Matthew sat for a few more minutes, sipping his soda in silence. If he was going to be ripped off, he was at least going to enjoy every last drop of the precious beverage. Sometime later, the door of the saloon pushed open, and a short round man with a mullet walked in and sat in one of the booths. Even if he hadn’t matched the physical description he’d been given, Matthew would have pegged the man as his client from the nervous way in which he fidgeted.

Which meant two things; this wasn’t going to be a simple passenger job, and he was about to charge hazard rates.

Matthew took the seat across from the man. “Vicente Luna, I presume?”

“Oh, Si, si! Señor Cole? Thank you for taking my contract!”

Matthew nodded. “You came looking for me. Speaking of, how did you come to hear of me?”

“Oh. Your reputation of course.”

There was a bit of an untruth there, or maybe he wasn’t telling the whole truth, but it probably didn’t matter. “How about you go ahead and explain just what it is you need. That nervous twitch you’ve got says there’s more to the job than what you promised.”

Vicente’s nose twitched and he licked his lips. “It’s just a passenger job like I said. I need to be in Warszawa, Mars in two standard days.”

“And I can do that, but that doesn’t explain why you’re shaking like a cornered animal.”

“Oh! It’s… Complicated.” Vicente leaned forward and cautiously pulled up the sleeves of his shirt. On his arm was a titanium tracking bracelet with a single green light that flashed on and off.

Matthew sat back in his seat, and took off his campero, setting it on the table in front of him. “Which cartel owns you? Whose territory are we in?” he asked, eyes narrowed. Slavery was ubiquitous on Europa. Its warm subterranean oceans gave a ready supply of irrigation water and made it the perfect agricultural center for the Jupiter Neighborhood. Long ago the fields, protected by environment shields, had been tended by robotics. But that had been in Moses’ time. Now, as the robotics failed with no way to replace them, a booming slave market led by a handful of cartels had taken hold on the moon.

“Does it matter who owns me? I’ve already got the payment forwarded to your broker and can get however much you could possibly ask when we get to Warszawa.”

“Yes, it does matter.” Matthew pointed an accusing finger at Vicente. He felt his blood pressure rising. Why had he even come to Europa to begin with? The odds of him running up against a cartel were all but guaranteed. “I’d put an end to every filthy slaver in the solar system if I could. But I can’t. I’m just one man. And if I free a slave, I make an enemy. I need to know who that enemy is before I decide if it’s worth it or not.”

He folded his hands on the table. “And you’d better not tell me it’s Hueso Rojo.”

Vicente smiled. “It’s Hueso Rojo.”

“Then we’re through here.” Matthew stood to leave but was stopped as Vicente desperately grabbed his arm.

“Wait, please! Señor! Just hear me out!”

Against his better judgment, Matthew sat. “You’ve got one minute to talk me into it.” With a stab of guilt, he knew that he meant it. He didn’t like the idea of leaving the poor man to his fate, but he had to watch out for his own skin too.

Relief flooded Vicente’s face. “Look, it’s not for me. Not really. My daughter, Emilia, she’s… I smuggled her off Europa years ago, and she’s made a nice life for herself on Mars. Last week I got a message from her. She’s marrying a Polish boy. Comes from a good family, wealthy. She’ll be happy and safe and… And I just… I need to see my girl again.” He started crying, soft tears running down his face. “You can even bring me back and turn me into the cartel afterwards. I don’t care. As long as I get to see her get married,” he trailed off and slumped into the booth.

After a story like that, there was really only one way this was going to turn out. Matthew knew what he was going to do, despite his misgivings. And he didn’t like it. While he certainly didn’t mind hurting Hueso Rojo, it was going to make it more difficult for him to operate around Jupiter. Any job he took out here was going to be more dangerous and that much more likely to get him killed. But the sight of the sad little man in front of him was more than he could bear.

“Fine, fine. But it’s going to cost triple.” He was after all still a businessman.

Vicente’s tears dried at once and he smiled brightly. “Oh, Señor, thank you! My daughter’s new family can pay handsomely!”

“Are you ready to go? Do you need anything else?”

“Only the clothes on my back.”

Matthew pointed at the tracker beneath his sleeve. “When is that thing going to alert your owners that you’re on the run?”

“I’m a mechanic in one of their garages a few blocks from here. If I get close to the edge of the city, it’ll probably go off.”

“I’m parked outside of San Martin,” Matthew said scratching the stubble on his chin. “Which means we’re basically guaranteed trouble. “Okay then. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

Half a block ahead of Matthew, Vicente walked down the sidewalk, hands shoved deep in his pockets and sticking out about as badly as he could. He kept glancing around nervously, sometimes even looking backward over his shoulder. Poor man was terrified.

Matthew muttered under his breath. He should have coached Vicente a little more on how not to look so glaringly like a runaway slave, but he suspected it wouldn’t have done much good. The man wasn’t used to subterfuge or deception and never would be. They were useless skills for the life he’d lived as a mechanic. Subtlety was something that had never been asked of him before, and if he made it to Mars, wouldn’t be asked of him again.

Problem was, Matthew was stuck with him in the meantime. If they’d had more time, Matthew could have returned to his ship and retrieved his grav bike and they could have just ridden out of town before anyone could react. But Vicente had insisted that he had been out too long after slave curfew.

Which meant there wasn’t much of a plan.

Keep on marching till that slave bracelet started screaming and then play it from there.

They were only a couple blocks from the edge of town. Matthew felt a vain hope that maybe it wouldn’t go off. Maybe they’d march right out to the Sparrow and leave this forsaken rock. He’d known it was a bad idea coming here, but the promise of an easy job had been too good to pass up.

A shriek sounded from down the street. Vicente had stopped and was staring at his wrist. Even from here, Matthew could see the red light. “Move it,” he muttered to himself. Almost as if he’d heard him, the mechanic suddenly straightened and started to run down the street.

“Much better,” Matthew said and flew into action. He dove into an alleyway at a sprint, adjusting his gait to compensate for the slightly lower gravity. It wasn’t low enough to really impair his movement, just enough to be annoying. He heard a rumble behind him and managed to turn just in time to see a six-wheeled troop transport roar down the road toward Vicente.

That didn’t take long. Better keep moving. His alley cut all the way through to the next street, and he continued running, cutting around the block to get up in front of Vicente.

By the time he had circled around to the far side and emerged behind them, Vicente was already on the ground cuffed. Four men stood over him. One of the four slavers kicked him in the side for sport and Matthew felt his blood boil. He knew this sort all too well. Slowing to a walk he drew his revolver, aimed, and put a bullet into two of them before they even knew they were in danger. The other two reacted at once, jumping behind the troop carrier for cover. Matthew kept advancing, aware that he had minimal cover of his own on the street. But the closer he got, the more advantage his revolver would have over their rifles.

When he was a little over thirty feet from the carrier, one of the men popped around the side to try to get a quick shot on him. Fortunately, Matthew was faster and put a bullet into the man’s arm for his efforts. The gun clattered to the ground, but its bearer managed to retreat to safety. The leader used the distraction to break cover on the other side of the carrier and fire a shot at Matthew. It was close. Matthew heard the crack of the bullet’s sonic boom as it split the air by his ear. He returned three shots, missing with the first and connecting with the next two. His enemy toppled to the ground unmoving.

He advanced, knowing that one injured enemy remained a threat. He rounded the troop carrier just as the last wounded thug reached for his lost weapon. Matthew put the seventh and final round of his revolver into the man’s hand. He cried out in pain and slumped to the ground in defeat.

“Get up, Vicente. We’ve got to go.”

The little man stood up and stared in awe at the bodies. Matthew had already secured the key to the handcuffs and freed Vicente. “Sí, sí…” He stood unmoving as if in shock.

“Vicente. If you want to see your daughter you get those feet moving. Now.”

The mechanic snapped out of it and, turning away from the bodies, started walking towards Matthew’s ship. Matthew glanced quickly inside the carrier and saw it had a thumbprint key. He briefly considered dragging the body of the leader over to see if he could start the vehicle, but knew that would burn precious time that they didn’t have.

He jogged to catch up to Vicente as they left San Martin behind and crossed the empty field. The ruddy light of Jupiter over their shoulder cast long shadows on the grass before them. Matthew could only hope they would make it to the ship before cartel reinforcements came and that they wouldn’t identify him. That was the last thing he needed. There was already enough bad blood between Matthew Cole and Hueso Rojo.

They were only a hundred feet from the ship when the bright lights of a vehicle fell on them from behind. With no cover in the open field, they didn’t stand a chance. “Run!” Matthew shouted as they crossed the final distance to the ship. He remotely lowered the ramp, just as bullets began to thwack the ground around them. Fired from a moving vehicle they were wild and poorly aimed, but even a poorly aimed gun can be lethal if you’re unlucky.

They dashed into the ship and Matthew mashed the button to close the ramp. “Welcome to the Sparrow.” Running to the cockpit, he jumped into the pilot’s chair and punched the ignition button. It wasn’t likely that small arms would damage the Sparrow’s outer hull, but it never hurt to be careful. Plus, odds were, the cartel had a friend or two in orbit that they were already contacting.

The Sparrow roared to life and Matthew felt gravity return to standard as the grav plates beneath their feet fired up. Vicente stumbled into the cockpit. “Strap in,” Matthew said gesturing to the co-pilot’s chair. “Unless you know how to operate a thumper turret.” Vicente’s eyes went wide, an expression that Matthew took to be a resounding no. He’d just have to outmaneuver any enemies or use the nose guns. Hopefully, they wouldn’t get that close.

He fired the landing thrusters and lifted off the ground before lighting up the main engines. The Sparrow rumbled as they picked up speed. Matthew heard a few stray bullets glance off the hull and he sighed. He’d have to check each and every one later for damage. In the meantime, his console gave no warning lights, so he’d just have to go on in good faith.

They quickly left San Martin behind, and Matthew rolled the Sparrow to put Europa above them. He had a suspicion that Vicente had never left the moon he’d been born on. May as well let him see if from above. The farmlands surrounding San Martin rushed by, and there was a slight jolt as they passed out of its environmental shields. They were beyond the furthest reaches of the settlement now as they roared over the yellow-white of Europa’s salt and ice flats. Matthew pulled the throttle back, and the Sparrow gained altitude and speed, now free atmospheric drag and burning for the freedom of space. He glanced at the scopes. A few ships here and there in local orbit but none looked like they were moving to intercept yet.

No sooner had the thought passed through his head, than two blips began adjusting their orbit. They’d make it before he reached the altitude he needed for a clean frameshift. “Hey, tell you what. Vicente? I think you get to try and wing it on the thumper turret.”

“I don’t know what…”

“It’s fine, even if you just scare ‘em a bit, give us some time. You’ve got a few minutes. Follow the main hall through the common room to the aft hall. Open the door at the end. Sit in the chair. I’ll turn on the intercom and talk you through it.”

Vicente did as he was told, and Matthew spent the next few minutes between watching the Sparrow’s instruments as he guided them into orbit and explaining the thumper to Vicente. It was easy enough a child could do it, probably, though Matthew admitted he hadn’t actually taught a child. The thumper itself was a neat piece of tech that worked on the same principles as the grav plates. All of it was artificial space-time curvatures, the fanciest bit of magic that Moses ever worked. Thumpers sent a bubble of extreme curvature at high velocity towards its target. Getting hit with a gravity gradient that big would do massive damage as it ripped apart ships, bodies, and anything else that got in the way. The nose gun was unfortunately only a thirty-millimeter chain gun. Not so useful in space where a distance of a hundred miles could be considered too close for comfort.

“Alright, they’re coming into range, Vicente. I’m going to start weaving. I don’t know what kind of weaponry they’ve got, so I don’t want to present an easy target.”

“Just… Just tell me when to try and shoot,” Vicente’s voice came back over the intercom.

Matthew looked at the readouts again. They definitely weren’t going to reach a high enough altitude to frameshift before the cartel blips closed the gap into firing range.

He tapped his fingers on the console impatiently, willing the engines to go just a little faster. When hostile thumper blasts started peppering the space around the Sparrow, he knew they were out of time. “Now’s good, Vicente.” Matthew watched the aft cam. Vicente certainly wasn’t going to be a professional anytime soon, but the cartel ships did begin to dart and weave, which slowed the rate at which their orbit would intersect the Sparrow’s. “Keep it up. You’ve got ‘em dancing. A hit would be nice, but we’ll take what we can get.”

The mechanic squeaked a response as he continued trying to get shots on the distant enemies. Matthew tried not to imagine what would happen if one of those thumper blasts hit the Sparrow. If they were lucky it would just rip holes in the hull that could be sealed off with bulkheads. If they were unlucky, they’d be a shooting star for all of Europa to see.

Suddenly a light on the console turned red. “Hey Vicente, we’ve got a new problem.”

“Oh Dios, no! What now? I thought we already had problems?”

“We do. But this one is new. And bad. You see that little red mark on your display?”

“Yes! What is it? Make it go away!”

“Actually, you’re gonna be the one to do that. It’s a torpedo.” Vicente didn’t answer, so Matthew kept talking. “Now if we’re lucky, it’s an EMP torpedo, and it fries our systems. Looks like we’re going fast enough to stay in orbit if it hits, so that’s a plus. Of course, when they board us, they’ll kill us both, probably after a nasty fight. If we’re not lucky, it’s just a high explosive torpedo. I think you know what happens if that’s the case.” Vicente was still silent. “It’s all you now, Vicente. If we’re gonna make it through, it’s going to be because you make the shot.” As an afterthought, he added, “Think of your daughter and how glad she’ll be when we roll into Warszawa.”

Vicente still didn’t answer, and Matthew wondered if he’d gone into shock. Figures, he thought to himself, I take a job I know I shouldn’t because it was the right thing to do and here I am about to get spaced. He wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, took off his campero, and tossed it aside. Maybe he could leave the cockpit unattended and run back to the turret just long enough to...

The aft thumper started firing and Matthew’s heart stopped beating. Precisely spaced shots. Matthew watched the rear cam as Vicente slowly dialed in the shot, each one getting a bit closer to the target as the torpedo homed in on them. It had already closed over half the distance and was shaving off the remaining miles by the second. Why did the thing have to be so fast? Matthew took a chance and straightened his flight path to give Vicente a cleaner shot, praying that a thumper wouldn’t connect in the meantime.

Ten miles to impact. He held his breath.

At just over one mile distance, the torpedo blossomed into a brilliant fireball that was quickly snuffed by the vacuum of space. “Alabanza Dios!” Vicente shouted over the intercom, and Matthew let out a breath and slumped into his chair.

The torpedo’s debris wave slammed into the Sparrow’s aft environmental shield and several pieces of shrapnel rang off the hull. Matthew glanced at his boards but didn’t see any warning lights showing system damage.

The cartel ships continued to fire thumper blasts their way, but in another twenty seconds, they’d be far enough from Europa’s gravity well to frameshift. He started charging the capacitors that powered the device.

When the clock hit zero, he punched it. There was a brief moment of disorientation as the frameshift worked its magic, instantly transitioning them from a few thousand miles per hour to nearly two percent the speed of light. He let the device run for almost thirty seconds before disengaging it with a similarly disorienting jolt.

“You did good, Vicente. We’re away.” Matthew ran a hand through his messy hair and put his hat back on. That was a lot closer than he’d bargained on.

As Vicente rejoined him in the cockpit, Matthew spun the Sparrow around to let the man see the only home he’d ever known. Jupiter floated majestically in the blackness of space, truly the king that the ancients had imagined it to be. Its moons lay scattered in orbit around their master, glowing orbs of light in the dark.

“The close one is Europa,” Matthew said in explanation, then turned to the computer to plot a course to Mars. Thankfully Mars and Jupiter were reasonably near to one another right now. They’d make it to the wedding with time to spare. He stole a glance back at Vicente, who had tears on his cheeks and appeared to be praying.

Matthew felt a pang of envy and concentrated on the job he still had to do.

Two days later Matthew stood on a small hill outside of Warszawa, Mars. In the distance, dull red bluffs rose above the horizon, and the late afternoon sun turned the sky a floral pink. Here, beneath the environmental shield, green grass carpeted the land. A century-old oak tree watched over the hill, probably planted by the first colonists, and it was against this ancient sentry that Matthew stood. Down the hill, a wedding reception was in full swing, a garish mix of Polish and Chilean culture. A moment of happiness in a solar system slowly dying. Vicente’s daughter looked just as he had imagined her, beautiful and dark-haired, like her mother apparently. Vicente had spent most of the flight to Mars chattering away about his family, wondering aloud at the life his daughter had lived in her absence.

Matthew didn’t mind so much. He’d just gone about his work, catching up on the never ending cycle of routine maintenance. It was something he never quite got ahead of. He was paid on landing and had thought that was the end of it until Vicente had all but demanded he attend the wedding.

It was the first time Matthew had been in a church in a decade, but he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that someone might recognize him. He knew that was a foolish thought. After all, Mars was a long way from Villa María.

Maybe it was just paranoia that the Hueso Rojo ships had ID’d him, but then there was no way they could know who was flying the Sparrow. That said, they would certainly know the Sparrow now. Maybe he’d avoid Europa entirely for a few months.

Or forever.

Matthew reached into his poncho to pat his breast pocket, feeling the hefty weight of the thousand-dollar coins. He turned and walked away from the wedding reception to where he’d parked the Sparrow down the hill. Sometimes it felt good doing the right thing. But then, it also felt good to get paid.

Chapter 2: Rings of Interference

What? Earthtech?

Yeah, it pops up on occasion. I wouldn’t exactly call it a regular occurrence, but it does tend to keep someone in this line of work on their toes.

Story goes that some of Earth’s cities survived the war after Moses under big domes or shields or something. Anyway, supposedly they’re still maintaining a much higher level of tech than we are in the colonies.

No, I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t even know anyone that’s ever been to Earth. All I know is earthtech is very real, and it’s very impressive, wherever it comes from.

And that’s not even the fanciest stuff. I’ve heard stories of one-of-a-kind pieces of tech out there custom made by Moses himself. We call ‘em Miracles, and if you run into a Miracle, you know it’s about to get weird.

Xuan Nguyen
Freelancer, operated out of Ceres
Died 70 AM

“Come on Benny. You’ve got to have something for me.” Matthew sat in the pilot’s chair of the Sparrow, boots off, feet on the console, staring at the blue-lit monitor. “There are hundreds of jobs out there for a competent freelancer like me.”

Benny’s nasally voice crackled over the speaker in the Sparrow’s cockpit. “No, there are hundreds of jobs out there for competent freelancers. Not hundreds for you.”

“Ouch. That kind of hurt…” That was a lie of course, but if he could get a little sympathy out of Benny, maybe he’d get a job. “I seem to remember that you liked me for having a high job completion rate. You do like getting paid, don’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah, we all do. Here’s the thing Cole. You’re too picky for your own good.”

“Just because I don’t like taking jobs involving murder, sabotage, illicit substances…”

“You’re making my point, not yours,” Benny challenged. “Look if you’d at least let me set you up on some team contracts.”

Matthew shook his head, knowing that Benny couldn’t see the expression. “It’s not my thing. You know that.”

Benny made an exasperated grunt and there was a clatter of noise. Matthew imagined him knocking something off his desk in frustration. He had that effect on the contract broker. After a moment’s silence, he heard Benny’s voice again. “Well then you better get used to being hungry, because you’re going starve at this rate.”

Truth be told, Matthew would rather not even work with a broker at all. Having a ten percent cut taken out of a job downright hurt. The problem was, most of the good freelance jobs weren’t even posted to the public boards. You wanted the big payouts you had to go through a broker. To make matters worse, the profession was getting more dangerous by the year, but then that basically described the general state of the solar system too.

Matthew decided he would wait Benny out. He could hear the clicking of a keyboard and then a sigh that Matthew thought was greatly exaggerated. “Okay. Okay. New job just hit since we started looking. It’s…” More key tapping. “It looks like a ‘Cole’ job,” Benny grumbled in a way that didn’t sound too convincing.

“Send it to me.”

Matthew glanced at the monitor as the overview of the contract popped up.

Job Type: Retrieval of Stolen Property, location known.
Danger: Medium to Low.

That was more like it. He tapped the entry, entered his credentials, and pulled up the expanded details. Perfect.

“See that wasn’t so hard was it?”

“Actually…”

“Thanks Benny, you’re the best. I’ll pay you when the job’s done.” Matthew turned off the monitor, cut the comm to the broker, and picked up his campero from the co-pilot’s seat, placing it on his head. Leaving the cockpit, he stopped at the first door on the right, his cramped cabin, and strapped his gun belt around his waist. He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror as he turned to leave.

“Time for a shave,” he said putting a hand to the week-old stubble covering his face. “Tomorrow.”

He exited the Sparrow and stepped out onto the concrete landing pad of the Kyoto spaceport. One of the bigger cities on Mars, Matthew had thought it would be easy to find a job here. But after he landed he remembered that was part of why he hated the place. Ugly, close-set skyscrapers, garish neon lights, and people around every corner, nothing like the quiet frontier towns of the Jupiter Neighborhood he’d spent so much time in. Of course, If you needed something, anything at all, Kyoto was the place to get it. Didn’t matter how legal or illegal.

Matthew lowered the cargo lift and mounted his grav bike. Luckily the contact for the job was just a few minutes ride from here. He raised the lift and fired the engines on the bike, the familiar deep rattle a comforting sound, and took off across the spaceport.

The contact lived on the thirty-fifth floor of an apartment building. Matthew was surprised to find it was the top floor. Must be the penthouse then. Explained why she was willing to pay so much for an object retrieval.

The elevator opened and he walked the short hall leading to a deeply etched oaken double door. He knocked and stepped back. There was a popping sound as an intercom came to life. “Yes? Who is it?”

“Matthew Cole, ma’am. Freelancer. Here for the job.”

“Excellent. Come in.” There was a mechanical click as the door unlocked.

Matthew pushed it open and stepped into an apartment that was lavishly decorated in traditional Japanese style, complete with sliding shoji doors, noren hangings covering the windows, and tatami mats on the floor. He stopped and glanced at his boots, hoping he wasn’t about to track mud into the apartment.

“Take them off,” a matronly voice commanded.

“What?” he said looking up.

“I said take them off. There at the entrance.” A stern-faced Japanese woman had entered the room. For her apartment being so traditionally arrayed, Matthew had half expected her to be dressed in traditional fashion as well. He was a little disappointed to see she wore a modern business suit.

He obeyed, pulling his boots off, and then stepped up from the lowered entry area into the main part of the room. “Mrs. Ishii? Matthew Cole. I’m here for the job.”

“Please be seated.” She gestured to the floor, and Matthew had to bite his tongue not to say something he’d regret. He understood respecting traditions, but this was starting to get a little out of hand. He sat on the floor and smiled at Mrs. Ishii, hoping it didn’t look too forced.

“Now then...”

She was interrupted almost at once by another knock on the door. Mrs. Ishii stepped to the door and pressed a small button. “Yes, who is it?”

“Abigail Sharon. Freelancer answering your job posting.”

Matthew grimaced. Great. Competition.

“Ah very well, I suppose there’s no harm in letting more than one of you onto the job.” She opened the door and stepped back in shock as a 7-foot tall woman entered the room.

Matthew frowned. The freelancer wore a floor-length coat that obscured most of her features, but her proportions were... wrong. And aside from being the largest woman he had ever seen, she looked strangely stiff under the coat, almost as if she were wearing an awful lot of body armor underneath. Didn’t matter who or what she was; a competitor wasn’t welcome.

The newcomer glanced around the room and then looked down at Mrs. Ishii nearly two feet beneath her. “You’ll forgive me, but I can’t exactly remove my shoes. I’ll have to stand here at the door if that’s okay with you.”

Mrs. Ishii looked up at the woman and nodded. “That is acceptable, Ms. Sharon.” She eyed the woman once more before walking to a desk and picking up a tablet monitor. “Thank you both for answering my posting. The job I have in mind should be relatively simple for skilled freelancers such as yourselves.”

Matthew tipped his hat to the newcomer, intent on being polite no matter how suspicious he was of her. “Matthew Cole. Pleased to meet you.”

The woman shrugged and waved him off.

Mrs. Ishii continued undeterred. “I need you to retrieve a… family heirloom of sorts. A ring that has been in my family for several generations now.” She showed them the tablet screen. It displayed a picture of a finely etched gold ring with a green gem. It was a bulky design with sharp edges and looked as though it would be rather uncomfortable to wear. He also wasn’t sure it was worth what Mrs. Ishii was paying for it to be retrieved, but then again, it’s hard to appraise sentiment.

“An employee of mine stole it two days ago, after learning of its value to me. Unbeknownst to him, the ring has a weak signal tracker in it. Unfortunately, its low-power transmitter isn’t very accurate. I can only narrow its position to an area of about a one kilometer radius.”

Sharon frowned. “I think you oversold us when you said you knew the location. That’s a lot of ground to cover in a city like Kyoto…” Matthew agreed and looked back at Mrs. Ishii expectantly.

The older Japanese woman scoffed. “Allow me to finish before you file your complaints. The indicated area contains the notorious Kashitoma Market. It’s a well-known location to fence stolen goods. I have little doubt my ring is there.”

“Hmm,” Matthew said scratching his stubble. “This could still take some effort to find. Do you have any other information that could help? The whereabouts of the employee, perhaps?”

“Takaya Ito has not been seen since the theft, but I suppose I could give you the address to his apartment. The Kyoto City Police found nothing of interest there, but perhaps a seasoned freelancer might find something that they did not.”

Mrs. Ishii printed a slip of paper from the tablet and passed it to Matthew. She looked to Sharon expectantly, but the woman only shook her head. “I’ll trust the KCP did their job and start at the market.”

“Very well. I don’t care which one of you brings back my family’s ring, only that it is brought back quickly. You may choose to work together or in competition, at your leisure. Good day.”

Sharon immediately turned and ducked through the door, her head barely missing the frame. Matthew grumbled to himself as he pulled his boots on in the entryway. He wasn’t about to let the other freelancer get an unfair head start just because she refused to take her shoes off. He sprinted out of Mrs. Ishii’s apartment and managed to stop the elevator just before its door closed.

In the confined space of the elevator, it was apparent just how large this Abigail Sharon truly was. “Well, best of luck to you, ma’am.” He offered her a friendly hand to shake. She looked at it and smiled, halfway between playful and menacing.

Abigail Sharon took Cole’s hand and shook. She shook just hard enough to make it hurt but was careful to not actually crush his hand. That would be rude and would make things too easy. Cole managed not to flinch, which impressed her, but she did notice the small twitch in his eyes.

“Quite a grip you have there.”

“Yes, thank you.”

They spent the rest of the short elevator ride in silence. When the door opened, Abigail walked through it, down the hallway, and out onto the street without a second glance. She had parked her grav bike beside a much smaller one, Cole’s presumably. She had mounted it and fired the engine, by the time Cole approached her again, his poncho and cowboy hat looking ridiculous in a city like Kyoto.

“What do you want, cowboy? In case you forgot, I’ve a job to do. I intend to be the one getting paid. I’m not here to make friends.”

“More of a gaucho really,” Cole said with an obnoxiously calm smile.

“Europa boy then? Huh, accent pegs you as an Arizona native.”

“Yeah, it’s a long story.”

“And I’m not interested.” She narrowed her eyes. “What do you want?” Abigail revved her grav bike’s engine to underline the point that she was in a hurry.

“Mostly just curious about that armor you’ve got on. Not sure I’ve seen anything like it, and I’ve got half an idea that it’s Earthtech.”

“Let’s hope you don’t have to find out, little cowboy.” She hit the throttle and sped away before he had a chance to respond. Of course it was Earthtech. What kind of a stupid question was that?

Abigail had spent a fair amount of time in Kyoto and was quite familiar with the Kashitomo Market. She’d been there on more than one job, and in fact gotten into more than one fight there. As she weaved through traffic across Kyoto, beneath the pink Martian sky, she tried to come up with a plan. She knew several of the fences by name, but not all of them, and she didn’t have any ideas where to begin other than to start talking to them, one by one.

She pulled up to the open-air market. It was the usual hive of activity. Hundreds of people filled the narrow aisles between the street booths and storefronts, lit by the harsh glow of neon. All legitimate activity. But Abigail knew what happened behind the scenes and when no one was looking. Competing Yakuza groups, fighting over position within the larger structure of the syndicate here in Kyoto. She parked her bike and walked into the market with a simple plan. Talk to the people she knew. Rough them up if necessary. Somebody will have heard something.

Either way, this was going to be a long day.

Matthew watched Sharon leave with interest. He’d heard a tale or two about a so-called Shield Maiden on Mars, a supposedly bulletproof freelancer that you didn’t want to cross on the job. He flexed his hand idly, remembering the crushing strength of her iron grip. If this wasn’t the Shield Maiden, he’d be surprised. Hopefully she was right; hopefully, he wouldn’t get an excuse to see her armor in action.

Mounting his own grav bike, he drove across town towards the thief’s apartment. Takaya Ito didn’t exactly live in as nice a part of town as Mrs. Ishii did. Piles of refuse filled every abandoned corner of the side street, making for a bad first impression. He dismounted and entered the rundown building. After a quick talk with the landlord in his office, Matthew walked the four flights of stairs to Ito’s apartment. Thankfully the landlord had been more than willing to offer him a key. He’d let the police in just that morning and wasn’t particularly surprised to see a freelancer on the case.

The apartment was a mess. Ito was clearly a bachelor. Laundry lay scattered around the room in heaps and bottles were piled in the corners. Matthew didn’t really know what he was looking for. Something, anything that might give him further direction. He’d rather not go to a notorious black market and talk to literally everyone that might buy stolen goods. That was a fool’s errand. After twenty minutes of searching the living room, he moved to the single bedroom and his luck was no better. He glanced into the bathroom.

A single pair of dress slacks lay on the floor. On instinct, Matthew riffled through the pockets of the pants and found a piece of paper.

“Jackpot.”

It was a handwritten note with a hastily scribbled name and a number. If that was a dollar amount, clearly the ring was more valuable than he had guessed. But Matthew was more interested in the name. M. Nakayama.

He shoved the scrap into his own pocket. He’d still have to ask around for Mr. Nakayama when he got to the market, but at least he wasn’t going in blind. Hopefully, Sharon hadn’t gotten lucky during his little detour.

Abigail had exhausted nearly all of her contacts in less than an hour’s time with no leads. Not even the threat of violence had gotten any information out of the fences. No one had heard of or seen an ornate ring with a green stone. No one had heard of Takaya Ito. A few people had heard of Mrs. Ishii, but she was apparently a rather well-known businesswoman in Kyoto. Her family owned several mines and a refinery in the northern polar regions.

However, none of this got Abigail anywhere. She had retreated to a sitting area near the front entrance to reevaluate her strategy when she saw Cole entering the market. He stopped and talked to a vendor selling spices. The woman nodded and pointed. Abigail’s eyes narrowed. Cole must have learned something on his side trip, and she was in danger of losing the payout to the little cowboy.

Cole began to pick his way through the crowd. Abigail fell in step fifty feet behind him, doing her best to keep to cover. What advantages her exo-suit lent her in a fight were quickly erased when stealth was required. There was a reason she tended to stick to jobs that allowed a bit more brute force. This simple mission had turned into something of a headache.

Abigail watched as Cole glanced around him and entered a butcher’s shop. She frowned, torn between following him and sorting things out her way or waiting for him to reemerge. In the end, she decided to try and intercept Cole on the way out. If she interrupted him too soon, the ring might slip through her grasp.

She leaned against a brick wall, pulling the coat around her to ensure it still concealed her armor. Hopefully, this wasn’t going to take long.

Matthew walked to the butcher’s front counter, making note of the terrible sanitary conditions. He certainly would not be back to patronize the business front for this fence.

An old man with a bent back stood at the register and smiled brightly when Matthew approached. “How may I help you, young man?”

“Here to see Mr. Nakayama. He has something I’m interested in buying.

“Of course, let me take you to him.” The old man opened a back door and led Matthew down a dimly lit hall. He knocked on a side door. “Someone to see you, sir. A Mr… What was your name?”

“Cole.”

“A Mr. Cole.”

Matthew heard a muted response from behind the door, and the old man opened it and gestured inside. He entered into what appeared to be a nicely furnished office at first glance. On closer inspection, he saw something different. Someone was trying too hard to look professional. Fake plants stood in the corner, and the room had been haphazardly painted a few too many times, as evidenced by the wall that had a serious peeling problem. As for Nakayama himself? Matthew knew a cheap suit when he saw one, and the cologne was so bad he could have smelled it a mile away.

Nakayama offered him a seat. “What can I do for you, Mr. Cole?”

Matthew sat and tried to look like he was relaxed. This was one of those conversations that he was going to bluff for as long as he could as hard as he could and then go from there. Worst case scenario involved his revolver. “I’ve heard from a friend that you’re the kind of man that procures… unique goods. It just so happens I’m in the market for something specific.”

“Oh, that is very good. And what might that be?”

“I’ve heard you’ve come across a certain ring. Green stone, detailed etching. I’m sure you know the one.”

“Yes, yes. Though I admit, you’re a bit earlier than I thought you would be. I wasn’t expecting you for at least another hour.”

This was the best thing that Matthew had heard all day, and it took an enormous act of will not to show it. “I’ve got a schedule to keep.” He looked Nakayama in the eye and took a chance. “The bosses like things nice and crisp. I’m sure you understand.”

“All too well, my friend. Tell Sugimoto I said hi.”

Matthew nodded “I’ll do that.” He desperately hoped that this Sugimoto wouldn’t come up again or else this little game was going hit a wall real quick. He did, however, file the name Sugimoto away as a curiosity. Never knew when that kind of thing might come in handy as a freelancer.

Nakayama opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out the very ring they were looking for. “I wasn’t aware that the syndicate had started hiring…” He reached up to touch the brim of an imaginary hat. “I admit, you caught me a bit off guard.”

“Well, I’ve not been around too long. I’m still getting my feet wet, so to speak, and I just do what I’m told.” Matthew tapped his foot nervously. Maybe this wasn’t going to work out so well. He pressed on using the first rationalization he could think of, hoping Nakayama would buy it. “But if I had to guess, the bosses probably thought a little bit of diversification would open up new doors. “This,” he said repeating the hat touching gesture, “will get me into places that you could never go.”

Nakayama nodded sagely and Matthew knew he had bought the ruse. “The grand strategy isn’t my business, of course, but I can see the wisdom there.” He looked at the ring in his palm one last time before handing it to Matthew. “I wouldn’t handle the thing too much if I were you. It gave me all sorts of nightmares last night.”

Now, this was certainly interesting. “Never really been the superstitious type,” Matthew said inspecting it closely for himself. It was without a doubt Mrs. Ishii’s ring. He pocketed it.

“Take my word for it,” Nakayama insisted. “That thing is bad news. Sooner you pass it off to whoever you’re supposed to give it to the better. Now if that’s all, I have other business to attend to. Oh, and remind Sugimoto to wire the payment over on time. I’d rather not have a repeat of last month’s little incident.”

“Of course.” Matthew stood and offered a hand to Nakayama. “If that’s all I’ll be on my way.”

Nakayama shook his hand and waved him off. Matthew left the room, doing his best not to laugh aloud. Nakayama was going to be in hot water when whoever he was actually supposed to pass the ring off to arrived, but then Matthew didn’t have a lot of sympathy for his type.

He’d had astronomically good luck, and he wasn’t quite used to that. Sure, he still had to deal with Sharon, who was undoubtedly casing the shop after she’d followed him here, but it never hurt to be grateful for the little things.

Matthew exited the butcher’s shop and glanced around. Sharon was right where he’d thought she would be, vainly trying to conceal her seven-foot frame in the shadows of a nearby alley. Briefly, he thought about trying to lose her in the crowd, but she would surely get suspicious and come for him if he even hinted at moving towards the front gate of the market.

Idly, he tried to pull up any memory he had on this supposed Shield Maiden. He couldn’t remember if she had a penchant for using lethal force or not. If so, this could get messy. Oh well, he thought glumly. May as well throw her off balance.

He looked over at where she leaned against a grimy brick wall, waved, then gave her a thumbs up. Immediately following this he took off at a run, away from the entrance of the market. Matthew resisted the impulse to look back as he darted through the crowd knowing it would only slow him down. Besides. He knew Sharon was coming. The heavy clomping and the whine of servos attested to that.

As he twisted and turned through the market, curiosity finally got the best of him, and he glanced over his shoulder. Sharon had ditched her long coat, probably so that she could run freely. She was armored head to toe in a bulky gunmetal gray exo-suit. Matthew had seen a few mining and construction suits that amounted to little more than hydraulic assists for lifting heavy loads, but what he saw barreling at him, at far faster than he liked, was clearly meant for military use.

“Definitely, Earthtech. Definitely not my day,” he muttered starting to regret that he had been coy about things. Thankfully, it looked like the crowd was slowing Sharon down, as they were unable to get out of her way nearly fast enough. He’d also noticed she wasn’t trampling anyone, so that was a good sign. Probably.

What she was doing was gaining on him. Matthew could tell by sound alone. He stole another look behind him. In fact, she’d be on him in just a few seconds. Suddenly, he spotted the opportunity he’d been looking for. He darted into a dense crowd of people and then crouched to the ground, turning and waiting for Sharon. When the crowd tried to part for her, Matthew moved with them towards the row of booths lining the street. Sharon passed, and he rolled under the nearest booth. The woman tending to the booth, who ironically enough sold cheap costume jewelry, opened her mouth to shout when she saw Matthew lying on the ground, but paused when he pointed towards Sharon and shook his head no. He did his absolute best to look terrified.

The woman hesitated, looked up at Sharon, and then back at Matthew lying on the concrete at her feet. He pointed in Sharon’s general direction again then wrapped both his hands around his own throat and mimed being strangled.

The woman nodded once and then went about her business.

Matthew went limp with relief, pleased that his ruse had worked, at least for now. He could hear Sharon clomping around the nearby market. Hopefully, she would think he had slipped elsewhere to better cover and would move on herself.

After a few minutes, the sound of Sharon’s exo-suit faded into the distance and Matthew breathed a sigh of relief. Now that he’d lost her, he stood a chance of getting out of this market. He cautiously crawled out from under the booth and poked his head out. The coast looked clear. He dug into his pocket and tossed a handful of coins to the woman for keeping quiet and then crept into a side alley.

Going back to his grav bike wasn’t an option. He’d have to find another way out of the market and back to Mrs. Ishii. And quickly too. He didn’t want Sharon thinking the easiest way to get the ring was to camp out at Mrs. Ishii’s apartment building. Then again, maybe she would expect him to find a different exit from the market. Perhaps by going back to the bike, he’d avoid her entirely.

Matthew scratched his stubble and sighed. This was probably a bad idea.

He turned and began to work his way through the crowd back towards the front entrance.

Whatever disappearing trick Cole had used was a good one. By the time Abigail realized he had dissolved into the crowd, it was too late, and there were a thousand hiding places he could have slipped into. Abigail had prowled that part of the street for a good ten minutes before giving up and retreating in frustration.

She’d thought for sure she’d won the day when Cole had foolishly waved to her. The fact that he’d known she was following wasn’t too surprising in and of itself. Some days she hated her complete and utter lack of ability to disappear into a crowd. That he’d managed to escape her was baffling. Chases were usually one of her strong suits.

Abigail paced a back alley. She had to outthink Cole. She could go back to Mrs. Ishii’s apartment building and wait for him there, but if Mrs. Ishii saw the ensuing scuffle, it’s possible she could refuse to pay Abigail and pay Cole instead. He had done the hard work after all. She clapped her enormous metal hands together in frustration. No, she’d have to catch him in the market, and by now he was probably trying to find some side exit to slip away.

Unless he wasn’t. Cole seemed a clever man, and sometimes clever men can overthink things. What if he went back to the front entrance thinking she would be elsewhere? It was a horrible risk, but Abigail had a feeling she was onto something.

She turned to head back to the entrance, knowing she would have to beat Cole there if this was going to work. If he saw her first, she’d never lay eyes on him again, and she could kiss this contract goodbye.

Matthew watched the front entrance of the Kashitomo Market for a full five minutes before making up his mind. He’d lost Sharon, and she certainly wasn’t anywhere in sight of the entrance. Taking the chance, he joined a group of people leaving the market, falling into step behind them.

His pulse spiked with each step as he drew nearer to the gate. If he’d misjudged and Sharon was sneakier than he thought…

He walked out of the gate and breathed a deep sigh. This had been the right call after all.

And then a metal hand fell heavily on his shoulder.

Matthew didn’t move, didn’t turn around. He just bit his lip at how unfair the universe could sometimes be.

“Oh look, I found the little cowboy.”

“Gaucho,” he corrected.

“Right. Still don’t care. You’re going to give me the ring, or do I have to start digging through your pockets?”

Matthew turned around to face his captor. He was surprised again by how far he had to look up to see her face. “Abigail, right? Can I call you Abi? Look, let’s talk about this. Maybe over a drink. I’ll buy. You’d let a nice guy like me buy you a drink, right? Do you like cherry soda?”

Sharon leaned forward and spoke a single word.

“Ring.”

He shrugged his shoulder. “Look Abi, I don’t have it. I was just on my way to…”

Sharon pulled a large post like object from her back and hit its base on the concrete. It widened into something that resembled a riot shield. Well, that explained why they called her the Shield Maiden, he thought. Nope, he wasn’t getting paid today. Not one filthy cent.

May as well twist the knife in.

“Look, you wouldn’t hit someone smaller than you now would you?”

He heard the faint hum of a grav plate warming up right as she swung the shield at him. The grav field hit him and tossed him across the street as easily as a child could throw a stone.

The good thing about getting hit by a grav field is that you don’t really feel the hit. Suddenly, you’re just falling away from it at a bizarre angle that gravity isn’t supposed to send you.

The bad thing is that no matter which direction you fall there’s still the sudden stop on the other side.

Matthew laid on the street, seeing stars, laughing to himself at a joke no one had told. Concussion probably, but he didn’t seem to have any broken bones. Sharon stood above him, hand outstretched.

He laughed one more time and dug the ring out of his shirt pocket and placed it in her metal hand. She turned to leave, and he called after her. “It was fun. Maybe we can do this again sometime, only next time, you can dress nice. Leave your work clothes at home.”

He couldn’t see her face, as she walked away, but he imagined her rolling her eyes.

There was a knock on the door to Mrs. Ishii’s apartment. She stood from her office chair and let Mr. Cole in again. This time he took his shoes off without being asked.

“Just making sure the job got done, Ma’am. Regrettably, I wasn’t able to return the ring to you and I don’t expect to get paid, but I thought I would check in to make sure Ms. Sharon completed the job.”

Her face creased with amusement. Most freelancers weren’t nearly so dedicated. “Why yes, she did.” Mrs. Ishii gestured to a nearby table where the ring sat. “Abigail Sharon left only a few minutes ago. You barely missed her, and, in fact, she thought you might come by.”

The man nodded and tipped his campero to her. “Well then, I think that’s all. Good day, Mrs. Ishii.”

“Actually, she left something for you.” That got the freelancer’s attention. She held out her hand, and he looked at the bright and shiny twenty-five dollar coin in surprise. “She said she owed you a drink. And an aspirin.”

He laughed and took the coin, then thanking her one more time, bowed his head once and left.

Mrs. Ishii stared at the door for a moment then took the ring in her hand. She walked to her office and pushed aside a noren, revealing a safe. Hopefully, its thick lead-lined walls would be enough to prevent the ring’s rather fascinating side effects from causing any problems. She knew better than to mess with things she didn’t understand.

She activated the comm on her desk, calling up an old friend.

“You’d better be calling me with good news, Ishii,” a gruff voice came over the speaker.

Mrs. Ishii smiled slyly. “You worry too much. Of course I got it back. You’d better get one of your people over here to take this thing off my hands. I don’t want to be near it any longer than I have to.”

Chapter 3: Train to Churchill

Oh, I most certainly blame the Americans. No doubt they all watched too many John Wayne movies in those days. What, you don’t know who he is? Famous actor from a couple centuries back. Cinema history buffs can tell you all about him. Just look him up. You’ll see what I mean. 

The Americans got here first. To Mars that is. Their infrastructure was already well developed, so Moses was able to get them out the door quickly, so to speak. They set up their first colony on Mars, took one look outside, thought it looked familiar, and named their little colony Arizona and the city Flagstaff.

 I don’t know if the cowboy hats were a joke at first or serious, but the things spread like a disease to all the other colonies when we got here.

 Next thing you know we were all living in a John Wayne movie under a benevolent AI overlord. 

The future is a most peculiar place, indeed.

 Edmund Hughes
Commander of Her Majesty’s Martian Colony
Died 2 AM

For Matthew Cole, there were a couple of downsides to a twenty-five dollar payout. First, it meant he was eating freeze-dried nutrient rations for the foreseeable future. The hold of the Sparrow had a locker crammed full of the nearly inedible bars. He’d purchased them years ago for lean seasons, and now certainly qualified. He peeled back the wrapper from the unappealing bar and took a bite. The complete lack of flavor wasn’t quite as bad as the dense, gritty texture. Matthew always had the impression that he was eating a block of dried mud.

The second downside to a twenty-five dollar payout was that his broker didn’t much care for a ten percent cut amounting to two-point-five dollars. Matthew tried to spin it as better than nothing, but Benny hadn’t found the joke funny. Not only had the broker disconnected the call, he hadn’t answered any of Matthew’s succeeding attempts.

For two weeks.

This wasn’t the first time this had happened, so Matthew wasn’t particularly worried. Next week he’d worry. Today?

Today he checked the public freelancer boards as he had every day and, as usual, came up disappointed. The Sparrow still sat in the Kyoto spaceport, incurring daily parking fees. He hadn’t moved it, afraid to burn the fuel until he had a job, but now the parking fees would cost more than the fuel. Sometimes you lost when you gambled.

The light on Matthew’s comm lit up, and he took the call, not even bothering to look at who it was.

“Alright. I have a job for you,” Benny’s voice rumbled through the cockpit.

Matthew smiled, mostly in relief. He tossed his unfinished bar onto the console, hoping he’d never have to touch another one if he could help it. “I knew you’d forgive me, Benny. What do you got for me?”

“Sending it now.”

The information popped up on Matthew’s display. Extra security on a prisoner transport. Then he saw the expected danger.

“Umm… Extreme hazard? Are you trying to get me killed?”

“No. I’m setting up a team for this contract.” Matthew heard a certain smug tone in the broker’s voice. He didn’t like it.

“I don’t do team contracts,” he reiterated for the hundredth time. “We’ve gone...”

“You do now,” Benny interrupted. “Because if you don’t do this contract, we’re never working together again.”

The cockpit was silent, except for the gentle white noise of the open comm channel. Matthew stared at the blue display. The pay would be good, but he didn’t do team jobs.

“Look, Benny. I appreciate you setting this up, but there’s a reason I don’t like doing this kind of job.”

“Yeah, so what? I don’t really care about whatever ‘loner’ mystique you think is so important. Cry me a Martian river, Cole. It’ll evaporate into the thin air before anyone cares. I’ve got a dozen other clients that would take this job in a heartbeat. But you know what? I thought about you, Cole. I thought about how hungry you are right now, probably eating mushy ration bars.”

Matthew looked at the half-eaten bar. “So you do care.”

“In so much as you’re a good freelancer when you actually work and make me money? Yeah, I care. And you know what else? You’re gonna cave this time and do this job.”

“Is that right?”

“Yup. And you’ve got exactly ten seconds to agree, or you’re never hearing my voice again.”

That’s almost cheating, Matthew thought in annoyance. He thought about calling the broker’s bluff. But then he also thought about his grumbling stomach. He gave it a nine-count anyway just for fun.

“Fine. I’ll do it, but just this once.”

He heard Benny’s nasally voice laughing on the other side of the comm. It sounded like he was covering the microphone with his hand to mute it and Matthew could barely make out muffled words. “You were right! He totally bought it.”

Matthew frowned, first at the implication that Benny might have actually just played him like a fiddle, then at the thought that there was someone colluding with him. “Who are you talking to Benny?”

“Oh! Umm… That was just my business partner, don’t worry about it. I’ll send the rest of the details on the job. No failures this time, Matthew.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m already on my way.” He started warming up the Sparrow’s engines for a quick hop to Mars’ southern hemisphere. “This is just a one time deal, okay? Just this once.”

“Sure,” Benny said as he cut the comm.

Matthew finished the pre-flight checklist and pulled up the Kyoto Spaceport on his monitor. He tried not to wince as he paid the Sparrow’s parking fee, nearly cleaning out the last of his account.

He should probably thank Benny for forcing him to take this job, but he didn’t want him to get too comfortable. Punching the engines, he lifted off, heading for new and, hopefully, greener pastures.

Not that anywhere on Mars was particularly green, though the Arizona region was certainly the closest. Here the environmental shields extended further from the cities than anywhere else in the solar system. A wide land of valleys filled with farms and settlements, nestled between red rock mesas, branched out from the city of Flagstaff. As the Sparrow approached Arizona, Matthew gave a wide berth to the regions atmo-factory. An enormous cometary fragment, brought here by Moses over a century ago, was slowly being consumed by plasma torches, releasing, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane, trace amounts of oxygen, and other gases into the thin Martian air. A dozen such atmo-factories were scattered around Mars.

Moses had promised to make the air of the red planet breathable without assistance from technology. The first step was to get the air pressure high enough to live without suits. The second step would have been to adjust its composition to make it breathable. But that was all history. Moses left, and the colonists had managed to finish the first step on their own by simply manning the remaining factories, though the air was still rather thin. The second was now just a dream, lost like so much else.

Matthew landed the Sparrow on the outskirts of one of the border towns. The green ended abruptly at the environmental shields, and the red sands of mars continued undisturbed by man as far as the eye could see. He walked into the small dusty town of ramshackle buildings towards the tiny police station. A town this size likely only had a single lawman, possibly even part-time or a volunteer. But he wasn’t here to see the local enforcer of justice.

Matthew pushed open the door of the station and found three men already inside. One was quite clearly the local lawman, dressed in faded and dirty blues and wearing the wide-brimmed cowboy hat that was expected of him on this part of Mars. The second man was another freelancer and thus one of the partners that Matthew was unwillingly going to have to work with on this job. Leaning against a wall, he was dressed in dark combat fatigues and had a rifle slung on his back. Vaguely, Matthew remembered that his name was Vance. He’d only seen the man once or twice at a distance.

The last man had to be the job’s contact. The civilian clothes he wore did little to hide that he was a government man. The too straight posture, the set of his jaw, all of it spoke of a bureaucrat that was used to having his way because he was from the government and he was here to help.

Matthew tipped his campero. “Matthew Cole, here for the job. I take it you’re Mr. Thompson?”

The government man nodded and offered a hand for Matthew to shake. “Ryan Thompson. Arizona Minister of Law. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Cole. I’ve not heard of you before, but the broker I spoke with claimed you were a man of principle.”

“I suppose you could say that,” Matthew said uncomfortably, shaking his hand. “But I’d rephrase it to say that I try and make an honest living.”

“I see. Well, the Republic of Arizona is only interested in working with honest freelancers such as yourself. It’s not good business to pay someone who might end up working for the bad guys next week, as I’m sure you understand. If you’ll just take a seat, we’re still waiting for the last freelancer.”

Matthew sat in one of the sparse room’s chairs and tapped his fingers idly, hoping the wait wouldn’t be long. He wasn’t disappointed in the wait. He was disappointed by who came through the door.

Abigail Sharon ducked her head as she entered the police headquarters. She wore her powered armor openly, no trench coat today to hide her fantastic piece of earth-tech. Her eyes locked onto Matthew’s and gleamed with amusement.

He tipped his hat to her politely. “Ms. Sharon.”

“Cole. How’s the head doing after that little spill up in Kyoto?”

“Better actually, thanks for asking,” he smiled. “No thanks to you.”

“Oh, you two have worked together before?” Mr. Thompson asked, oblivious to the subtext.

Matthew scratched the back of his head. “That’s… maybe a little too generous a way of putting it.”

Sharon smiled and leaned against a wall, her exo-suit polished to a shine. “I laid him out flat in the street. Just business. Nothing personal.”

The government man eyed them both with suspicion. “Is this going to be a problem?”

“None at all,” she replied sweetly.

Matthew thought about saying yes. He thought about walking out of the police station and back to the Sparrow. But then he also thought about the ration bar that probably still sat on the console. “No problem, sir. As Ms. Sharon said, just business.”

“Good,” Thompson said. He didn’t look convinced. “I hope you don’t have a similarly distasteful past with Mr. Vance.”

“I know him only by name.” Matthew extended a hand to the third member of the team who shook it curtly.

“Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Cole.” Vance smiled a big smile, the kind that irritated Matthew. He tried not to let it get to him. Some people were just annoying. Didn’t mean they weren’t good at their job.

“Alright, the niceties are out of the way,” Sharon said impatiently. “What’s the job?”

The government man turned on the monitor mounted to the wall. It flashed up with a map of Mars’ southern hemisphere, highlighting a rail line. “Prisoner transfer. I’ve been working for months to take down the Hawthorne gang. They’ve been operating out of this part of Mars for the last four years and getting bolder as time goes on. Last week, my deputies made a key arrest, none other than James Hawthorne himself, the second in command under his older brother.”

“Congratulations,” Sharon said. “I’ve had more than one run in with Hawthorne goons. Last time we ended up demolishing most of a warehouse. It was fun.”

“I remember. Let’s not have a repeat, please,” Thompson said, shaking his head. “James was responsible for murdering a member of Churchill’s parliament last year. As such, the Brits have formally requested that we extradite him to Churchill, presumably to hang him on the steps of parliament. I’m not really in a position to deny the Prime Minister, as I owe him a favor. Tomorrow morning, James Hawthorne will secretly be transported on the mag train to Churchill.” He rubbed his hands together. “We’re trying to do this quietly, to keep the Hawthorne gang from trying to spring their man en route. The train is a normally scheduled passenger train, with one of the cars exchanged for a high-security cell. We’ll have ten armed deputies in the car with Hawthorne.”

“Where do we come in, exactly?” Vance asked, leaning forward.

“Truth is, I don’t like this whole operation,” Thompson said, “but the Brits insist on having their man. I’d rather deal with James Hawthorne myself, but that’s not going to happen. And it gets worse. I know for a fact that I’ve got a mole somewhere in my officers. There’s no other way the Hawthorne gang could predict my operations the way they do. Picking up James was sheer luck, something I’m a little loath to admit. I think odds are good that his gang already knows the plan. You three are my wildcard. This job is off the official record, and I paid good money for the broker to keep this quiet. If the Hawthorne gang shows up, I hope to surprise them with the Shield Maiden and two of the best crack shots in the solar system.”

Made sense, Matthew thought. But if Thompson had security issues, odds were good the Hawthorne gang would find out about the freelancer backup anyway. Of course, there was also the chance that this was all for nothing. “What happens if the guests of honor are no shows?” he asked.

Thompson smiled tightly. “Then you three get the easiest paycheck of your lives, courtesy of the Republic of Arizona.”

Matthew sat back in his chair. One could hope, and maybe even pray, that would be the case. A little easy money would be a happy ending for everyone. Well, except for James Hawthorne.

Abigail Sharon didn’t like the job, not one bit, and not because she didn’t like working with a team. That was a pretty regular occurrence. She didn’t even particularly mind working with Cole, despite their little run in a few weeks ago. She’d given him a hard time, but he’d seemed a decent sort of guy from what little they’d spoken. At the very least he was polite, and that was rare enough in this day and age.

The minister’s calm confidence that something would indeed go wrong and that he had a mole, that was unnerving. Even if he managed to keep the fact that the freelancers were around for extra muscle a secret, it meant that the Hawthorne gang was almost guaranteed to show up, and in force.

This made her trust her teammates a little bit less. When you have a mole, everyone is a suspect.

After the minister had left, the freelancers spent the next hour going over the details of the operation. In the end, they decided to split up across the mag-train. Vance would guard the rear car, posing as a passenger and keeping lookout. Cole would also pose as a passenger, but in the frontmost car right before the secure cell. Abigail, unable to go undercover, would join the deputies in guarding James Hawthorne directly and only show herself if it became clear an escape attempt was being made.

Vance was staying at a hotel in town. Abigail returned to her skyhopper, a fixed-wing aircraft designed for flight in Mars’ low air pressure. The sun was setting over the distant hills as she lowered the ramp on the small craft. She paused and looked to her right. In the distance, Cole was boarding his much larger and fancier spacecraft, a Ceres Spaceworks Model 42. It was basically every freelancer’s dream ship. Sleek, able to defend itself, room for cargo, passengers, a crew, or whatever else you wanted. It was one of the best multipurpose workhorses out there.

She felt a pang of jealousy and knocked her armored fist against the hull of her skyhopper. A spacecraft of her own would be a dream come true. No longer limited to jobs on Mars, she’d be able to hit up the rest of the system as well.

“Lucky dog,” she muttered and ducked into the entrance of her own craft. The whole thing was too small for her armored form. Little more than a cockpit and a cramped living quarter, her skyhopper was no luxury suite. Abigail stooped in the middle of her quarters, picked up the power cable, and plugged in her exo-suit. It could run for days without needing a recharge, but she never took chances. She’d never yet been caught without power and had no intention of that ever happening. Checking her wrist to ensure the power banks were receiving the charge, she knelt to the deck and cracked the suit open. Pulling her arms out of their armored counterparts, she reached back and grabbed hold of two bars above her bed and pulled herself out of the armor.

Abigail cracked her knuckles and stretched out on her bed. Grabbing an old paperback novel off the shelf above her head and a box with a freeze-dried self-heating meal, she settled in for the night. Despite being one of her favorites, she had a hard time concentrating on the words. Not even the wittiest exchanges between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy held her attention as her mind kept wandering back to tomorrow’s job. Maybe it was just pessimism.

Or maybe tomorrow really was going to be that kind of day. It was always hard to judge this sort of thing.

She turned the light out and tried vainly to get some sleep.

The next morning Abigail got up early, checked over her armor, and ate a quick breakfast. She suited up and went to the train station. The grey pre-dawn light filtered over the hills and a chill breeze blew through the border town. She was met by a deputy who escorted her to the secure train car. Looking like an ordinary passenger car, it floated a meter above the magnetic track. Inside was another matter entirely. It was armored like a tank and had four barred prisoner cells.

There was only a single deputy present. He shook her hand, nervously, and introduced himself as Captain Stanley.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms., uhh… Shield Maiden. I’ve read a lot about you and respect your work.”

Great, she thought. A fan. She smiled graciously, “Yes, well, we’re all here to do a job.” She gestured to the empty cells. “Is our guest on schedule?”

Stanley straightened and nodded vigorously. “Yes, Ma’am. James Hawthorne will be arriving via armored car in just over one hour. You are welcome to take a seat until then.”

Abigail laughed and with a metal palm slapped the thigh of her suit, making a loud noise. “I don’t exactly tire. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just stand.”

“Yes, I umm... Of course.”

She smiled at his awkward response, enjoying one of the pleasures her earth-tech suit afforded her. Waiting around for the next hour was not among those pleasures, but they had decided it would be better if Abigail weren’t seen stomping onto the train. Hence the early morning.

Sometime after the sun rose, Abigail heard the roar of a personnel carrier pulling up outside, eight deputies and James Hawthorne in an orange prisoner coverall boarded the train. He was a man of average height with a sandy beard. Nothing much to look at, but he was apparently an outlaw leader with a penchant for murder. Shows how you could never really judge a book by its cover.

Hawthorne startled when he laid eyes on Abigail. As he passed her, she looked down at him and laughed. “That’s right. Whatever your little men have planned is not going to work.”

He spat at her and was wrestled into a cell by the deputies. Captain Stanley laughed. “You ought to treat a lady with a little more respect. I get the feeling she could rip you limb from limb.”

The outlaw leader didn’t say anything, just glared daggers at the deputies from behind his bars. Abigail leaned against the wall in front of him and crossed her arms, deciding to stare him down while she waited. There was an unpleasant tickle in the back of her mind that Hawthorne was a little too calm, even after his initial shock of seeing her.

There was going to be trouble. She was almost certain.

Matthew sat in one of the stiff seats in the first passenger car back from Sharon. The dingy car seemed far dirtier and run down than when he had ridden this very line a few times as a kid. Still, he mused, at least it was running. Mag trains could be repaired when they broke, unlike some other bits of infrastructure.

He looked over the rows of seats. There were only a handful of passengers in the car. He had chosen the rearmost row so that he would see any passenger that tried to enter or leave. He tapped his fingers idly on the rail, waiting for the train to depart the station. Churchill was some nine hundred miles from Arizona. The trip by mag train was about four hours, normally enough time for a good nap. Today it was going to be monotonous waiting for something to happen. This was the kind of job that could make you jump at shadows as it dragged on.

He was confident that something would happen. Something in the quiet sincerity of the government man’s own confidence had sold Matthew on that. It was just a matter of time.

There was a slight bump as the train departed and began to pick up more and more speed. He took a glance out the window as they raced across the red Martian desert. There was even a bit of blue in the usually hazy red sky this morning. He pulled back a sleeve and glanced at his old wristwatch. Weeks ago he had set it to Mars length days, which were conveniently only a few minutes longer than standard. He dialed it to local time. If the bandits were smart, they’d make their move at the two-hour mark. Halfway in between the colonies would give them more time before reinforcements could arrive.

Then again, sometimes there was value in doing the unexpected. Twenty minutes into the ride, three men entered the car. There was nothing suspicious about the way they dressed, simple working clothes with wide-brimmed hats, but there was no good reason for them to have changed cars. Matthew watched them casually as they walked toward the front of the car. They didn’t seem to have marked him. He pulled out his comm and signaled the other two freelancers. He got an immediate counter signal from Sharon. She must have been ready and itching for action.

Vance didn’t answer. Matthew fired the signal again and grimaced. Vance may have already been identified and eliminated.

The three men had reached the front of the car and neared the door. Matthew stood and bellowed, “Everybody, get down!”

This was for two reasons. First, he wanted the handful of civilians in the car to hit the deck. This was going to get violent one way or another. Second, he wanted to give the suspicious characters a chance to either prove their innocence or guilt before he opened fire. All three of them spun and drew their guns, and Matthew had his answer.

He fired four shots from his revolver, striking two of the men before they even finished turning. The third was fast and had his own gun drawn before the others hit the ground. Matthew dove behind the seat as sparks scattered from the bullets. The report was deafening in the enclosed space. He was on his feet again in a moment with his gun trained towards his target. The outlaw had taken cover behind a partition at the front of the car.

Matthew took a risk and fired all three shots at the partition. There was a cry of pain, and the man fell into the aisle. Matthew pulled a speed loader from a pocket and had his revolver ready to fire again. “Make sure your cover is bulletproof next time,” he said to no one in particular as he walked past the rows of seats.

Thankfully the few passengers had heeded his warning and taken cover before the fight. “Might want to stay down, ladies and gentlemen. I think you’re in the middle of an old-fashioned train heist.” He signaled Vance one last time. Still no answer, and at this point, Matthew expected that there never would be.

He ducked behind a chair and called Sharon.

“No answer from Vance. Three bogeys down. You quiet up there?”

“Quiet as a church. Were there only three?”

“So far. If I had to guess the main assault will be coming soon, possibly by air. They probably posed as passengers to flush out extra defenders.”

There was a pause on the other end of the comm. “Think they were looking for us specifically?” They were both thinking the same thing. Thompson’s security problem was a gaping hole if the Hawthorne gang already knew about the freelancers.

“Either way they seemed to have found Vance. Keep your eyes open. I’m going to try and get a look at the sky, see if we’ve got incoming.”

“Keep me posted.” Sharon cut the link and Matthew moved into action. He stepped through the door at the front of the car and shut it behind him. Pulling a breathing mask from beneath his poncho, he placed it over his face. Mars’ atmosphere was thick enough that you no longer needed a pressure suit, and most of its citizens were used to cold-shirting it short distances from building to building or train car to train car if they were outside of the environmental shields. He would be outside longer than that though. He pushed open the heavy outer door and stepped out onto the small platform. The red Martian landscape raced by, a blur of sand and rock. The train car in front of him, the one containing the prisoner, Sharon, and the deputies, was joined to Matthew’s by a single hitch. A flexible hanging bridge made it possible to cross safely from one to the other.

But Matthew didn’t intend to hole up with Sharon just yet. Turning, he climbed the rung ladder on his car and poked his head over the top of the train. He saw exactly what he feared he would see. Two skyhoppers, much like Sharon’s, approaching fast from the rear of the train. In just a few seconds they’d be here.

“Sharon,” he shouted over the whistle of the wind. A small environmental shield at the front of the train greatly reduced wind drag. This had the side effect of making the wind atop the train much slower, which, considering the circumstances was a pity. Matthew wouldn’t have minded one bit if the top of the train was inaccessible due to hurricane force winds. “Skyhoppers inbound.” One passed overhead and slowed above the train’s engine. Which meant the other… He whipped his head around. It hovered over the rear of the train, and four men had already landed lightly atop one of the cars. They braced against the wind. “Sharon. The engine. You’ve got company from the front.” He shut off the comm and aimed his revolver across the top of the train. The intruders hadn’t noticed him yet. He fired four shots.

Through sheer luck, he hit one target in the arm. Unfortunately, they were way out of the practical engagement range of his revolver and, realizing this, they crouched and returned fire. Three guns answering his one had Matthew retreating back down the ladder. He’d have to make for the secure car. From there, he’d stand a chance with Sharon and the deputies. As he stepped onto the platform, Matthew felt the muzzle of a gun press into his back.

“Sorry about this,” Vance said.

Matthew almost thought he meant it. At least now he knew why the man’s smile had been so obnoxious.

“I thought Thompson said he was only hiring principled freelancers for this job?” He was stalling, of course, grasping for a plan of some sort.

Vance was quiet for a moment. “Turns out we all have our price.”

“That’s pretty blatantly untrue,” Matthew said carefully.

“I wouldn’t be so sure. Just because you haven’t found yours yet doesn’t mean you won’t someday.”

Matthew shook his head. “You know nothing about me.”

“You’re right. I don’t. And sadly, I never will.”

That was as good a warning as any. Rather than take a bullet to the back from a coward and sellout, Matthew dropped to the ground, praying to take Vance by surprise. He swept a leg towards the other freelancer and in the process took him down. The rifle Vance had been holding discharged harmlessly into the sky. For a few moments, there was a tangle and confusion of limbs as both men tried to get their bearing.

Unfortunately for Vance, Matthew found his first, and his fist found the other man’s face. There was a cracking noise. Vance would have a broken nose and Matthew a few jammed fingers, but the traitor dropped like a sandbag to the platform. Matthew’s breathing mask had come free, and he grabbed its hose and shoved it back on his face. He checked to make sure that Vance’s was secure too. Asphyxiation wasn’t a death he’d wish on anyone.

From the secure car, he heard a barrage of gunfire, and he leaped to his feet hoping it wasn’t too late.

“Skyhoppers inbound,” Cole’s voice rattled over Abigail’s comm. Above her head, she heard the roar of the aircraft as one passed above her train car.

“Look alive,” Captain Stanley ordered.

She moved to the front of the car and pulled her riot shield off her back. It sprang to life with a faint hum. Her armor was tough enough to stop most small arms fire, but she still preferred to take them in the shield. Better not to take too many chances.

A spray of sparks began to shoot from the door as the Hawthorne gang cut through it with a plasma torch. “Breathing masks on!” shouted Stanley.

Abigail lowered her own transparent face shield and waited patiently, knowing this would give her one good shot at whoever was on the other side. The moment the torch had cut a complete circuit around the door she slammed her shield into it, giving it a good jolt from the grav plate.

The heavy steel door blew outwards taking at least two men with it. Abigail didn’t know what happened to them but figured their bodies would someday be found on the dry Martian landscape, half-mummified. Gunfire began to ping harmlessly against her shield. Then she heard something bounce across the ground near her feet.

A flash and a deafening roar echoed through the train car, and for a moment Abigail feared they had tossed a live grenade through the hole. As the stars began to clear, she realized with relief that it was only a flashbang, but the distraction could prove disastrous. Still reeling from the blast, she pushed her shield to block the missing door. There were more pings of deflected gunfire. Then she noticed the car filling with smoke.

“Find that smoke grenade and get it out of here,” she bellowed over her ringing ears. It was too late. The car was filled with smoke, making it almost impossible to see. Breathing wasn’t a problem for the deputies due to their masks, but it was hard to know where a threat was coming from if you couldn’t see it. The outlaws would probably have thermal vision to see through…

A shaft of light came from the rear of the car, cutting through the smoke. “Sharon!” Cole yelled.

“Keep your eyes on the rear door. I’ve got the front!”

“We’re going to have more company from the back in just a minute. They unloaded a squad on the rear cars.”

Abigail swore under her breath.

Captain Stanley gave new orders to his men, and four of them exited the rear of the car to defend from that position. The gunfire had stopped, and Abigail risked a peek around her shield. She couldn’t see anyone on the other side. That didn’t make sense. What were they…?

The voice of one of the deputies rang through the car “The prisoner!”

There was a clang of metal, and the rush of air as a new hole opened in the train car’s side.

So that was the purpose of the flashbang and smoke grenade. Distraction while they cut through the prisoner’s cell. One of the deputy’s revolvers barked twice. “Too late! They have him!” a voice shouted.

Abigail growled and unlatched what was left of the door, pushed it open, and stepped out onto the platform. Empty with no outlaws in sight. She grabbed the rung ladder and pulled herself up to the top of the car. The skyhopper at the front of the train had drifted back behind the secure cell, and several men, including James Hawthorne, were running the length of the train towards it.

Having no better plan, she ran across the top of the secure cell after them, leaping lightly to the next car. It was a dangerous leap for a man on foot, but for her, it was an easy jump. The outlaws must have heard her heavy suit land with a bang. While Hawthorne continued running towards the skyhopper, they turned and opened fire. She advanced slowly as the bullets ricocheted off her shield.

“Use a hand?” Cole asked from behind her. Abigail glanced at him in surprise, unaware that he’d followed.

“Be my guest,” she said through gritted teeth.

Cole stood behind her, using her and her shield for cover and began returning fire with the bandits. He was a good shot. Real good. In a matter of seconds, two were downed, and the remaining three were beating a hasty retreat. “Move forward,” he said calmly. “The deputies are pushing through the train beneath us as we speak.”

“Who put you in charge?” Abigail countered as she pressed towards the skyhopper. It was three cars away, and James Hawthorne had almost made it to safety. Reaching the end of the car, she leaped to the next and glanced behind her as Cole took a running jump to join her.

She could reach Hawthorne. Easily.

But then the skyhopper opened fire.

Its chin mounted chain gun began unleashing a storm of lead on them. She knelt to the ground so her shield would provide better coverage. The larger caliber bullets would almost certainly pierce her armor’s shell. Cole took cover behind her again, his back against her own. Hopefully, any passengers below were out of the line of fire. Abigail tried not to think about that right now.

“We might have a problem,” he said, his voice surprisingly calm.

“You think?”

“Yup. I’m going to be eating ration bars till the day I die.”

“You do seem to be good at failing contracts,” she shouted.

“I seem to remember that I was the only reason anyone made any money back in Kyoto.”

“Can this wait till later?!” she shouted. He wasn’t wrong, but she wasn’t about to admit it.

Hawthorne was surely tucked into the skyhopper by now. The second aircraft had in fact already pulled away from the engine and was drifting back alongside the train. The chaingun stopped, and Abigail risked a peek around her shield. There was a rumble as Hawthorne’s skyhopper throttled up and it roared overhead. Cole’s revolver fired a few parting shots that glanced harmlessly off the hull of the craft.

Abigail cursed under her breath as she realized that the second skyhopper was right beside them. A side hatch opened, and something caught her eye.

“Sharon!”

So Cole had seen it too. An outlaw had a shoulder mounted thumper aimed at them. She brought her shield around and stepped between Cole and the weapon right as it fired.

The blast from a thumper is visible. In a vacuum, the artificial bubble of curved space bends light somewhat around itself creating an obvious distortion. In atmosphere, the bubble also gives off a faint iridescent light, some exotic reaction with air molecules. Abigail didn’t really understand the science. But she did see the blast as it lanced across the short distance separating the train and the skyhopper. It hit her shield squarely and she heard a high-pitched shriek as the grav plate in her shield tried to neutralize it. It held, barely, but as the thumper blast collapsed in on itself, it let loose a shockwave that blew both her and Cole off the train.

There was a moment of weightlessness. Through sheer luck, they happened to be traveling along the top of a steep hill and the ground was nearly a hundred feet below them. Abigail returned her shield to her back but left it engaged. Cole hurtled through the air beside her. Reaching out she grabbed his arm and pulled him to herself. She saw the look of surprise on his face as she wrapped her arms around him. His breath mask had been knocked off and he fumbled in her grip to replace it. Abigail rotated to land on her back, feet facing down the slope.

This whole process took only a few seconds as the ground rushed up at them. They hit the slope at high speed, but the grav plate in Abigail’s shield absorbed the majority of the impact. Mars’ lower gravity also helped keep their speed non-fatal. Half supported by a cushion of gravity from her shield, she did her best to keep her feet from touching the ground. If this turned into a wild tumble, Cole was as good as dead.

Red rocks and dust flew up behind them as they slid down the hill. Judging they had shed enough speed, she planted her feet to continue slowing them. As they neared the bottom of the hill, she clipped a large boulder and lost hold of Cole.

Matthew bounced another twenty feet across the shallow basin of sand at the bottom of the hill before tumbling to a halt. He coughed, then realized his mask had come free yet again. He replaced it and took a deep breath, promising himself to find one that secured to his face better.

A few minutes passed as Matthew lay on his back, glad to be alive. He had been supremely confident when the thumper fired that his life was over. The fact that Sharon had somehow managed to save them both was something he was still trying to process.

Speaking of, Sharon stood over him. “How you doing, cowboy? Any serious injuries?”

“I’m going to hurt in the morning, but I’m alive,” he accepted the hand offered to him and stood to his feet. “I guess that’s that,” he grumbled. “I don’t think Thompson hired enough guns.”

Sharon shook her head. “I think the whole cloak and dagger on a public train was the real downfall. No heavy weaponry to chase off the skyhoppers. What a disaster.”

Matthew grunted. “Thanks, by the way, for saving my life.”

She nodded, seemingly distracted.

Not knowing what else to do, Matthew started walking back up towards the tracks. He’d spotted his hat halfway up the hillside and stooped to pick it up. The low gravity made the trek tiring, and he began to sweat despite the chill in the thin atmosphere. They reached the hilltop and, without a better plan, started hiking down the track towards Arizona.

“Arizona has a serious security problem,” Matthew mused. “I know Thompson said he had a mole, but that was nuts.”

“You’re telling me,” Sharon agreed. “They knew which car and even which cell in the car.”

Matthew stared at her for a moment and then realized she was missing an important detail. “Oh right, I think I forgot to mention that Vance was a traitor.”

“What?” she asked, rounding on him.

“Yeah, he wasn’t answering for a reason. Vance held me at gunpoint, but I managed to turn it into a fist fight. I broke his face. He’ll live, but not if I ever see him again.”

Sharon suddenly laughed. She looked at her wrist and tapped a few buttons. “This job may not be over after all.”

Matthew gave her a good stare and raised an eyebrow in an unspoken question.

“I didn’t trust either you or Vance after Thompson expressed his concerns. Last night I slipped a tracker on both of you before we left the briefing.”

“I would have noticed that.”

“I can be subtle,” she said defensively.

“You weren’t subtle back in Kyoto.”

“Check your hat.”

Matthew took off his campero. Sure enough, a tiny black disk was nestled between the crown and brim. He didn’t say anything and merely replaced the hat.

Sharon laughed again and tapped her wrist. “I just checked on Vance’s tracker. It’s north of here.”

Matthew nodded. “And the train went east. So Vance was able to retreat with them. He didn’t stay down long.”

“He’s got an impressive reputation. I’m not surprised.”

“We follow your tracker to Vance and the Hawthorne gang. What could possibly go wrong?”

“Beats not getting paid,” she said.

“And eating ration bars,” he concluded. “Fine.” He pulled the air compressor off his belt that connected to his breath mask.

“How much time do you have?” Sharon asked.

“Eight hours. Probably not enough to make it back to Arizona. I’m not exactly sure how far out we are.”

Sharon gave an exasperated sigh and knelt to the ground. She gestured to her back. “Hop on.”

Matthew stopped and crossed his arms. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Not a bit. Either you ride piggyback, or I carry you bridal style. Your choice.”

“You’re sure you can carry me that far?”

“Yes and much faster than you can walk. Come on. We don’t have all day.”

Matthew walked over to her and climbed on her back. “This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever done.”

Sharon laughed. “Quit complaining cowboy. We’ve got a job to finish.”

I hope you enjoyed the first three chapters of After Moses. The adventures of Matthew Cole and the Sparrow are just getting started. Click below to see what happens next!