A sharp pain awoke Joe. He sat up and rubbed his neck, the cool touch of the raw stone wall lingering on his forehead. Blinking his eyes clear, he checked the wall clock. Two hours before the start of shift. He was still sitting at his table, an empty whiskey bottle and a half-eaten bowl of snack rations sitting in front of him.
He stood and turned to the kitchen cupboard, grabbed another whiskey bottle, and washed down the bile in his throat with a long pull straight from the bottle. Still holding the whiskey, he turned and took two steps to the opposite wall of his apartment, pushed a small button and stepped out of the way as his sleeping pallet flipped down out of the wall.
He lay flat on his back, holding his back and neck as straight as possible, willing the pain away. The ceiling reflected a dull, grey light back at him.
His thoughts returned to the same loop they had played all night. He was convinced it was his face in that dossier. But how had they found him?
El Hoyo was deep inside Aynman territory. The GTC called themselves the Galactic Trade Consortium, but they were really a cartel, so all competition came from inside the cartel. The two largest factions inside the GTC—one led by Aynman Corp and the other by his family—were brutally territorial. There wasn’t a Larsen Shipping controlled route or base within a dozen light-years of El Hoyo. The kid in the bar should never have made it this far alive.
The GTC must have known it was Luc in the prospector suit, otherwise they would not have made him remove the helmet. Did they follow Luc to El Hoyo, hoping he would lead them to Joe?
Joe hadn’t seen Luc for years. Since long before he disowned his family and moved to the frontier. While a minnow in the GTC, the Rousseau family had benefitted from the close relationship between Luc’s father and his own.
Of similar age, Joe and Luc were inseparable as boys and through the Academy. As they got older, however, the distance between them grew. Luc began resenting Joe more and more, mostly because of Joe’s close relationship with Elizabeth Holm, their other childhood playmate. Luc had been infatuated with Elizabeth since they were teenagers.
Why would Luc come looking for me now?
He touched the small panel next to the bed; rows of faint icons glowing at his touch. Joe tapped his favourite wallpaper, and the ceiling turned into a star field, millions of points of light in a wide band spanning a deep blackness. The Milky Way.
He had been so sure that among so many billions of stars, he could hide. Safe from his past, hidden from his enemies and far enough away from his friends that he couldn’t hurt them anymore.
After four years on El Hoyo, so far out on the fringe that not even the local GTC knew him as anyone other than the drunk named Joe Smith, he was confident they had all forgotten him; given him up as either lost or dead somewhere in that vast expanse.
“Why now?” he said, echoing his thoughts to the silent room, almost wishing it would provide an answer.
He decided he had to get off El Hoyo. He’d need to find another mining rock, even further out on the frontier, and start again. Whatever reason Luc and the GTC had to come look for him, he couldn’t let them find him. They would make him go back, and that was the one thing he had vowed never to do.
Joe pulled up the comm on his screen and dialled Brian’s apartment. No answer. He tried Brian’s portable. No answer, just the service.
Brian knew the right people. Joe had been friends with him long enough to hear the stories and to know firsthand that Brian could get people off El Hoyo and away from the GTC.
Joe waited ten minutes and tried again. No answer, just the service.
“Brian, answer the fucking phone.” Joe punched the screen, yowling in pain as his knuckles proved no match for solid polycarbonate.
Joe sat up and swung his legs off the side of the bed.
Too fast.
A wave of nausea rolled up his throat, causing his head to spin and his ears to burn. He stumbled over to the sanitary cubicle; the toilet sliding out of the wall just in time as he retched noisily into the bowl.
Joe reached out and touched the wall of the cubicle. A panel slid back, revealing the contents of his bathroom cabinet. He pushed aside the razor and toothbrush and grabbed a bottle of green stim pills. A small, unassuming plant of unknown origin, stim’s effect on human physiology was remarkable. Not only a stimulant that worked in minutes and lasted for an hour or more, stim also ramped up the human immune system to a point where it could destroy any infection, kill any virus. Over the last century, stim had halted the spread of a rampant plague virus that had nearly wiped humanity from the galaxy.
It was also an excellent hangover cure.
Joe slugged back a pill with a glass of water and sat and waited for the fire of the stim to burn through his blood. In a few minutes, his head cleared, and he stood up and turned toward the toilet.
While whatever was in the stim was great for the body, the plant itself was poison to the stomach. It only took several more minutes before Joe heaved violently, spraying the bowl with green foam. The GTC controlled ninety percent of the market for stim and had little interest in cutting into their profits by improving the drug’s palatability. So Joe, like everyone else, accepted that the side effects were worth the result.
Joe stood and rinsed his mouth. He kicked the bowl back into the wall and turned on the shower, grabbed his toothbrush and rubbed his face. A shave could wait a few more days. Minutes later, he stepped out of the shower, alert and without the slightest trace of a hangover.
Definitely worth the result.
Joe stepped back into the room and was reaching over to the comm to try Brian’s apartment again when his door buzzed. Joe stepped over to the intercom. “Damn,” he said as his neighbour’s face came on the screen. Joe flicked on the audio. “Mal, what do you want?”
“Work time sleepy head.” Mal’s fractured grin distorted into a mad leer as he leant towards the fisheye lens. Joe looked at the clock. Somehow, three hours had passed since he woke up.
“Gimme a sec,” Joe tapped the door pad. Mal stood just outside the door, slightly hunched and so covered in filth that Joe couldn’t tell where Mal ended and his clothes began.
“I’m not going out today,” Joe said.
Mal narrowed his eyes. “Why?”
“Just don’t feel up to it.”
Mal huffed a laugh through the gaps in his teeth, Joe taking an involuntary half step backwards as Mal’s rancid breath hit him in the face. “Bullshit, Joe. What trouble are you in now?” Mal folded his arms, a speculative twinkle in his eyes.
Joe scowled at Mal. For a man who looked and smelled like a caveman, Mal could be infuriatingly perceptive.
“Get any decent hauls yesterday?” Joe asked, changing the subject.
Mal pulled at his densely matted beard. “No, most of it was metamict. Barely fifty percent crystalline. You?”
“Two runs of sixty percent. The rest was shit.” Joe lied.
“Hope they find some new ekanite deposits soon,” Mal said, “I’m barely breaking even at the moment.”
Joe nodded. The ekanite haulers were paid by weight and purity. FTL engines ran on crystalline ekanite, so it was extremely valuable, but the Thorium in ekanite gradually destroyed the ekanite crystals until after a few thousand years it was useless—metamict. At fifty percent purity, Mal would have to make eight hauls a shift to cover his running costs.
“The worms have been running out into the East Valley. Maybe there are some better hauls further out?” Joe said.
“Maybe,” Mal said. “Now stop trying to change the subject. What’s going on, Joe? Anything I should know?”
Joe shrugged. “I just had a bit of a run in with the GTC at McIvor’s last night. Got a little too drunk and there was a big fight. Wasn’t feeling up to it today,” Joe said.
“If you’re waiting for the GTC to get bored and go away, you’ll be safer out on the surface than hanging around the first place they’ll come looking for you,” Mal said.
Joe hadn’t thought that part through. Mal was right. It wouldn’t be long before the GTC came to check his apartment. He’d left messages on Brian’s service. Brian would call when he picked up the messages. Joe was sure of it.
“You’re right, I guess,” he said. “Let me grab my coat.”
When they reached the hauler bay ten minutes later, it was empty except for their two haulers. Most of the other crews had families to feed and obligations to meet, so they left early in the shift.
Joe’s priorities were booze, stim, rent and food. In that order. It didn’t take too many high purity hauls to keep him happy. Mal lived life on the edge of oblivion, and Joe suspected he liked it that way.
He wasn’t far away from that precipice himself.
“See ya tomorrow, Joe.” Mal turned and walked towards his hauler.
“See ya.” Joe’s hauler was two hundred metres away at the far end of the bay. He was the last in from shift yesterday. He didn’t mind. The extra walk twice a day surely offset some of the damage he was doing to his body.
He headed for the cab of his hauler. It sat on the front of the craft, a rounded square box framing flat forward and side windows, tiny compared to the huge hopper on the back. With their eight support legs, Joe often thought the haulers looked like a giant grey tick. Given they fed off the lifeblood of the rock he stood on, the comparison was apt.
He climbed the ladder up into the cockpit and flicked on the console. He pulled the ladder while the ship ran diagnostics. When his panel lit up green, he tapped the switch to disengage from station gravity and his hauler floated lightly off the pad. He turned the hauler towards the bay doors, a faint shimmer of the shield flicking across the yawning black hole that led out on to the surface of El Hoyo.
As he put on the thrust, Joe called up his playlist. Thinking of the hooker from last night’s encounter, he scrolled down to AC/DC and selected ‘The Jack’. He cranked the volume and, as the timeless twelve-bar riff hammered in the surrounding cabin, Joe accelerated out of the bay, head nodding to the beat and a smile on his face.