Belt Three. John Ayliff
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way along the corridor when Jonas saw movement. A ripple of sharp twitches passed along the rows of servitors as their implants activated them. They began rising to their feet, each making the same smooth, compact movements. Doors in the partitions slid aside.
Jonas looked around in panic. Someone was in control and trying to stop him. He must have read Keldra incorrectly when he had guessed that she was the only free-willed person on the ship. He looked for controls to the partition doors, but none were visible. The servitors were on their feet now. The ends of the corridor were beyond the grav-ring ceiling horizon in both directions, so he didn’t know which end was closest. He broke into a run, towards the far end of the corridor, away from the prison cell.
The partition doors were fully open now. A servitor stepped into his path, massive hands outstretched. He had been a mining servitor, and was still wearing the Reinhardt Industries uniform. Jonas raised the nerve gun and fired. The servitor convulsed and fell, but two more were already stepping out into the corridor behind him. Their movements were uncoordinated: it looked as though they had only a basic non-combat programme. He fired wild bursts along the corridor and shouldered past the servitors as they fell.
The bulkhead door to the next corridor section was in sight now. Jonas kept firing, pushing past bodies, and fighting off clumsy, grasping hands. The door was locked, but there was a manual override behind an emergency panel. He pushed down on the lever, putting all his weight behind it. The door resisted for a moment, then sprang open, revealing a grey corridor mercifully free of servitors.
Servitor-Ayla was a few metres behind Jonas, the combat programme fighting its way through the other servitors easily, delivering swift chops precisely to their nerve points. He fired into the throng, clearing a path for her, until she was in reach, and then grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her through. He shut the door and engaged the emergency hard lock. A minute later there was a series of thuds as the servitors banged ineffectually on the door. He rested his head on the steel wall and paused for a moment, fighting to get his breathing under control.
He had reached the ring’s transit hub. The door to the transit module tube was closed, and lighted icons indicated that the modules were elsewhere in the ship. Whoever was in charge of the servitors would no doubt prevent him from recalling one. His plan for taking control of the ship had already failed. He needed a way out.
Each ring should have its own set of escape shuttles, and they were normally close to the ring’s transit hub. After a few moments Jonas found the door he needed.
The shuttle bay was cramped, with vacuum suit racks and tool lockers running along its walls. In the floor were four circular airlock hatches. Between them, through thick, foggy windows, the coffin-like shapes of the shuttles were visible, clamped in their recesses in the outer hull.
Like the doors, shuttle control had a local override, a fail-safe so that the crew could evacuate in the case of a ship-wide malfunction. There was even a local belt display based on the shuttle bay’s own lidar. At the moment it showed a binary pair of rocks, the smaller of which had a habitation beacon. Jonas grinned. If he could reach that outpost he would be home free.
An intercom on the control board crackled to life.
‘That’s as far as you get, true-born.’ The voice was breathless and uneven, but it was Keldra’s. She sounded as if she was running.
Jonas leaned in to the intercom. ‘How did you survive?’
‘This ship won’t let me die.’
He stabbed the controls to prep one of the shuttles for launch. ‘I’ve got shuttle control. You can’t stop me leaving.’
‘I’ve got fire control. If you launch one of those shuttles I’ll blow it out of space.’
He hesitated. ‘You wouldn’t. You want me alive for ransom.’
‘You think I make empty threats?’
A chime sounded to signal that launch prep was done, and a hatch hissed open. Jonas stared at the cramped, cocoon-like space beyond. With the system running on local override, there was no way to launch a shuttle except from inside it.
Servitor-Ayla was standing behind him, obedient and alert, the combat programme scanning the room for threats to its master. Her face was expressionless; the woman behind it was already dead.
‘Servitor,’ Jonas said slowly, ‘go into that shuttle and use the launch control.’
Servitor-Ayla paused, and, for a moment, Jonas thought that the command to launch a shuttle had been too complex for the combat programme, but then she walked forward and climbed through the hatch. Jonas watched through the floor window as the clamps released and the shuttle fell away from the hull, drifting to one side as the Coriolis effect took it away from the shuttle bay. Ayla was visible momentarily through the tiny filtered window, before the thrusters fired and the shuttle dwindled to a point.
A missile streaked across the window. The shuttle exploded into a million glittering shards.
Jonas punched the side of the control panel in frustration. Now there was nowhere he could run. Involuntarily, he thought back to what Keldra had said about consciousness surviving a mind-wipe. He knew it wasn’t true, but if it was, then letting her destroy Ayla’s body had been the most merciful thing.
The door from the corridor opened. Jonas turned just in time to see Keldra powering across the floor towards him. Before he could move she grabbed his throat and slammed him against the wall.
‘You don’t steal from a thief.’
He wriggled in her grip. She pulled upwards, choking him and nearly lifting him off his feet. A pair of burly servitors entered behind her and trained their nerve guns on him.
‘You don’t steal from a thief,’ she repeated. ‘You steal from a business owner, they have insurance, they have law enforcement. They have their true-born family to help them out. A thief doesn’t have all that.’ Her grip tightened, making his eyes water. ‘You steal from a thief and they’ll hunt you down and kill you as a warning to everyone else, because you don’t steal from a thief. You don’t steal from me.’ She released him and he doubled over, gasping. ‘Why didn’t you wait? I could ransom you to your family. That’s the way this normally goes.’
Jonas lay against the wall, feeling his throat. He could taste blood in his mouth. The game was up; she had already shown she was prepared to kill him rather than let him escape. He might as well tell the truth for once.
‘I’m not a true-born,’ he croaked.
Keldra delivered a swift kick to his ribs. ‘What’s your name, clone?’
‘Jonas 2477-Athens-20219, Administrator.’
She kicked him again, less hard this time. ‘Bastard. I lost a good shuttle because of you.’ She looked down at him, calculating. ‘What happened? How’d you get where you are?’
‘Gabriel Reinhardt was a Scriber. He Immolated six years ago. The Belt Three branch of Reinhardt Industries should have passed to his next of kin, but…’
‘You took over.’ She smiled slyly. Was that admiration Jonas saw on her face, or did she just like the thought of a true-born family being screwed over?
‘I was his personal assistant, so I had access to nearly everything,’ he said. ‘I fired all the staff who knew his face, and rebuilt the business. His family’s up in Belt Four. He didn’t talk to them much, and they never knew he was a Scriber.’
‘But if I ransomed you to them, they’d know you weren’t him. Hah.’ Keldra was still looking thoughtful, as if sizing him up for something. ‘You’d still have been living like that if that Worldbreaker hadn’t shown up. You must hate the Worldbreakers.’
‘Hate the Worldbreakers?’ Jonas looked up, incredulous, trying to work out if she was serious. ‘I hate you, you damn pirate! There’s no point hating the Worldbreakers. They’re just there. There’s nothing we can do about them.’