It was no wonder the domes were at each other’s throats again.
Between the diplomatic reports and what Jamyung had told her, Elena expected a level of chaos in Smolensk. Budapest stocked no hand weapons, so none of the crew were armed. The best Elena had been able to do was make sure she, Bear, and Chiedza were all dressed in vacuum-ready env suits, hoods easily accessible in their pockets, as prepared as they could be for physical attack or attempted ejection from the dome. Even as they brought much-needed food supplies, she expected suspicion and threats, or worse.
But when they reached the colony, Elena found her fears had been misplaced. Smolensk was not chaos. It was a ghost town.
She stood next to Bear as he talked to the import official, with Chiedza behind her double-checking the supplies they’d brought against Yakutsk’s intake list. Through the windows of the small depot, she could see the city’s normally crowded streets were nearly empty. Not that they weren’t lived in—all the walkways were covered in Yakutsk’s ubiquitous red dust and littered with footprints—but she saw only three people walk by in the ten minutes she stood next to Bear.
She had seen Smolensk during political coups, a strange hybrid of anarchy and brisk commerce. She had seen drinking and fighting next to mundane business transactions. She had never seen it empty.
“I’ll need to verify this with the company,” the official said. He didn’t seem afraid, Elena noticed, but he was irritable. Ordinarily, Smolensk-level irritable. Nothing to fear?
So where is everybody?
She looked over at Bear. “When are we leaving?”
He shot her a look. It had taken her some time to convince him to let her go look for Jamyung. This might not be the Corps, she thought, but he still wants me to know he’s pissed off at me. “Three-quarters of an hour,” he told her. “Do not be late, Shaw. If you are, we’re leaving you behind.”
She headed out into the city, keeping her hand over the folded suit hood in her pocket. Realistically, she knew it was a useless precaution. If someone wanted to throw her out of the dome, they would certainly think to divest her of her hood first.
She thought of Jamyung’s vacated scout and deeply missed the little snub-nosed handgun she used to carry on missions in the Corps. She clutched the hood more tightly.
She had not seen Jamyung in more than two years, but she recognized the shop from a distance: prime real estate, not five minutes from the port, a nondescript and windowless gray building, surrounded by a massive vacant lot filled with piles of junk. Neat piles, of course: battery parts in one corner, nanopolymers in another, carefully insulated crates containing logic core pieces, and one massive bin of conduit and connectors. When she had first seen it, it had seemed like a candy store, but nothing kept outside was particularly valuable. All of Jamyung’s specialty parts were inside, in a locked basement vault that was as large as the lot itself.
She rapped on the door. “Jamyung?” she called, and tried the wall panel. The door slid open—unsurprising; these were business hours—but the lights were off. She frowned, leaving the door open behind her, and pulled a pin light out of her tool kit, illuminating the space with cool gray. The room was typically Spartan, containing only Jamyung’s desk and a chair; but the desk was askew, revealing the trapdoor to the basement vault. He had opened it—or someone had broken in. She stepped over, uneasy, and blinked into the darkness. If he was down there, he was too far afield for her to see his light. “Jamyung?” she called. Her voice slapped flatly in the low-ceilinged space.
“He’s not here.”
She started and turned, her hand going to her hip for her nonexistent weapon, then relaxed. Clearly this was one of Jamyung’s scavengers: short, slim, dark-haired, beige-skinned, and dressed in brown—deliberately nondescript. Dark eyes blinked at her, neither pleased nor bothered.
“Do you know where he is?” she asked.
“Dead.”
The bottom dropped out of Elena’s stomach. “Dead. Are you sure?”
The scavenger nodded.
“What happened?”
“He got vacated.”
Shit. “What’s your name?” she asked; and then, as an afterthought, “I’m Shaw.”
“Dallas.”
She took the offered long-fingered hand; Dallas gripped her hand briefly and firmly, then let go. Polite, she thought, and professional, just like Jamyung. “Dallas, was his vacating part of the political nonsense that’s been going on here lately?”
A snort of near laughter. “Nah. Politicians didn’t care about Jamyung. He got tossed by strangers.” The scavenger waved long fingers at her.
“Like me?”
“Different from you,” Dallas elaborated, “but still strangers. Dressed like Baikul agents, but they hadn’t grown up in a dome.”
Damn, damn, damn. It seemed Jamyung had been right about the object after all. “Do you know where he is?”
A nod.
She checked the time: more than half an hour left. The least I can do is bring him in from the cold. “Can you show me?”
A shrug this time. “Easy enough to find him. He’s not going to get up and walk away.”
To Elena’s surprise, Dallas met her at the side airlock in a full env suit, tugging a low anti-grav pallet. Despite the lack of visible grieving, the scavenger had apparently already been planning to retrieve Jamyung’s body. She was not the only one, it seemed, who had developed some loyalty to the dead trader.
She secured her own hood and let Dallas walk ahead of her to open the door. It was a passive pass-through, like they used for the shuttle docks, with a short corridor used as a buffer rather than an atmospheric generator. She waited while the outer door opened, and together they stepped out into the bleak frigid darkness that was the surface of Yakutsk.
The sky above them was black and dusted with stars, but there was a tiny glowing lip of orange-yellow peeking over the moon’s horizon, diluting the severe night sky. The gravity was far lower than it had been inside the dome, and she gave herself a moment to adjust, gripping the edge of the doorway. Dallas was clearly used to it, however, stepping forward confidently, and Elena followed with slow and careful steps, growing accustomed to the bounce. The dome’s lower windows were unshielded, and cast artificial light partway onto the flat, dusty landscape; Dallas had turned on a headlight, and Elena pulled the pin light out of her tool kit.
“He’s close,” Dallas told her.
In fact, she saw them in the shadows, less than twenty meters ahead: bodies, perhaps two dozen, in a haphazard pile. Most of them, she noted, were still wearing env suits, although they were hoodless. Torture, then: keep them alive out here to think about it for a while, and then yank off the hood.
What has this place become?
But Jamyung had not been wearing a suit. She spotted his familiar flimsy overalls, the flat soles of the shoes that had always seemed too small for him. Approaching the body, she shone the light on his face: familiar, frozen, startled, dead.
Shit.
Behind her Dallas brought the pallet. “I’ll get his feet,” the scavenger said, and positioned the skiff next to the body. Elena walked around to Jamyung’s head and slid her arms under his shoulders.