“God designed it, my boy, to keep this place from ever quite feeling like home.”
“Hey, what about me?” Wendy protested from the kitchen. “Mr. Mursk, you said you had a young man for me. You said you'd show me around, or he would, or something. You just got done telling me how that pirate stuff was all in the past. What were you, lying?”
Bascal looked from Conrad to Wendy and back again. “It sounds as though I missed something. Perhaps something better missed, something a good father ought not to want to know. Wendy, fear not, I will order Conrad to keep his promises to you, provided they are honorable. And Conrad, with this Guard as my witness, I do hereby legally request your presence at Skyhook Station at the top of the Gravittoir, there to travel to Bubble Hood, for rendezvous with your ship. I can't make it an order, much as I'd like to, but my suggestions have considerable impact on those who disregard them.”
“Fine,” Conrad said, allowing himself to relax. The situation was fixable. In fact, he had all of eternity to fix it, and this was just the first step. “What's the job?”
Bascal smiled wickedly. “Why, first mate of the QMS Newhope. She's got a systemwide procurement tour coming up, and I need someone onboard I can trust to speak for me. The captain is an old girlfriend of yours, I'm afraid, but that's just the sort of problem we immorbids have to put up with in life. So? What do you think?”
Conrad mulled it over for about a tenth of a second before saying, “With this Guard as my witness, Sire, I accept.”
And thus was sealed the fate of a planet.
Chapter sixteen.
A death in the mines
Various events transpired, some interesting but most rather dull and repetitive, adding little to the collection of memories and impulses and rote responses which called itself Conrad Mursk. But life is long, and in the fullness of time Conrad found himself screaming, covered in blood, furiously uploading notes into a neural halo as his internal pressure dropped and the lights around him dimmed. He stopped screaming, and then he stopped breathing, and moments later he was stepping out of Newhope's sole remaining fax machine, in the forward inventory.
Shit.
“Life signs went flat, so I ordered another backup,” said Money Izolo, who was crouching beside the machine, performing some sort of routine maintenance again. “Sorry, man.”
Shit. Double shit. Murdered again, right when he was at his most charming. Conrad was slow to anger these days, but he surprised himself—and Money—by slamming the wall hard with his fist, shattering several bones with an audible and decidedly painful crack. Then of course he just had to step into the fax again, to correct the damage. He had grown accustomed, as in the old days, to having the fax right here at hand. It really did change your outlook, your self-image, your views on pain and injury. Still, death was never a thing to be taken lightly.
He turned a baleful gaze on Money Izolo. “Should you be messing with that thing while I'm printing? If you fuff up the wrong thing at the wrong time, could my pattern be permanently erased? Or worse, mangled?”
“There are safeguards,” Money replied easily, barely pausing to glance up from his work. “The only way I could erase you is if I was trying to, and even then it would take some effort. You worry a lot, sir.”
“Wouldn't you?” The observation irritated Conrad, who after all had just been violently killed. Twice!
But Money ignored that and said, “Besides, this old gal's getting cranky in her autumn years. She's lasted us well, but she's full of stripes and defects, and not even Brenda really knows how to fix those. She can take a look when we get back to the drydock at Bubble Hood, but ‘old' is a hard thing to fix. What we need is a new one.”
“Tell it to the miners,” Conrad said, stomping out of the room.
He did manage to restrain the urge to break his hand again, but he stomped and cursed his way through the levels of Newhope's tall needle, and through the mating airlock, and through the longer, twistier corridors of the thirty-kilometer-wide Inner Belt asteroid known as Element Pit. When he got to the scene of the crime, the perpetrators were still standing around, looking down at two bloody heaps of Conrad Mursk.
“That one is going to cost you,” Conrad told them angrily. “Once is a moment of weakness. Or unbearable passion, which is even easier to excuse. But twice is just bad manners, and stupid besides. You may have asked yourselves why I'm not armed, why I'm not concerned once again for my safety. Have you? Have you asked yourselves that? Because it's a question very pertinent to these negotiations.”
“We don't want your fuffing cash. We can't use it,” said the leader of the miners, whom Conrad had never been formally introduced to, but who matched the description of Leonard Chang, the erstwhile director of these facilities. If so, then he was from Earth. More specifically, from Eastern Russia, where he'd no doubt grown up with every privilege an Earth boy could have.
It was a damn sight more privileges than an asteroid miner in Barnard could ever hope for, and Conrad's sympathies did extend that far. It was a sour deal, and there was no point trying to sell it any differently. But Planet Two needed metals (especially iron) and rare earth elements (especially neodymium), and Conrad's job was to see that they were delivered on time. And he knew as well as anyone that if he didn't succeed, things would get even worse. Even here.
“You may want to flush that voice buffer,” Conrad told the man impatiently. “I've heard that, what, five times now? And very little else. Yes, you want a new element mixer. You want a new print plate for your fax machine. You want your mommy to come and kiss the boo-boos for you, but she's not coming. She told me so in bed this morning.”
“You've got a foul mouth, Navy Man.”
“And you've got a bloodstained wrench, Mr. Chang. I'm not in a terribly good mood, and the law takes a dim view of these things, and at this particular time and place, it so happens that I'm the law. Now before you start swinging those things again, you do need to ask yourselves: why is this man not armed? From the outset I was against sending armed escort along with Newhope. Hell, I was against arming Navy ships in the first place. I mean, who have we got to fight? But it was never my decision, and as it happens there's a commander named Ho Ng, in a ship called Tuitake or King's Fist, loitering about a megaklick downsystem from here, stealthing in the glare of Barnard.
“Maybe you've seen him on TV? Fighting in the arena? The exact weapons at his disposal right now are classified—I'm not even sure I know myself—but I have commander Ng's assurances that he can depopulate this asteroid without significant harm to its facilities or stores. And if that happens, the whole stinking lot of you can be replaced with freshly printed children who don't know enough to complain about the conditions. Is that clear? Are there any specific points I can elaborate on, to broaden or deepen your understanding? Because against my better judgment I'm going to give you one more chance.”
Conrad hated making threats, especially because he couldn't afford to make empty ones. But just now he had what Barnardean negotiators called nima, or “hand.” Except for control over his own physical safety—a minor point at best—all the advantages were his, and he couldn't afford to take no for an answer. Thus, he meant every word he said, and in fact if the tactical situation were known to Ho Ng, Conrad would probably be ordered back to Newhope, and Xmary advised to withdraw the ship to a safe distance so these people could be murdered where they stood. Like most things in life, it wasn't Conrad's decision, and he really was giving these dirty-faced ladies and gentlemen a break. Out of the goodness of his own twice-murdered heart.