Life for McPhail was so much better when he was alone.

  He used to be a geologist. A lot of travel, with survey teams and groundbreaking teams. It was fine. He used to be married, that was fine too. They didn’t see all that much of each other which was how they both liked it.

  Then there was this one very difficult year. Maybe getting on for two years by the time the various parts had stopped bouncing and rolling. At the end of it McPhail didn’t have a wife or work as a geologist any more. Not entirely unrelated. Then out of the spiral McPhail’s sister got in touch to tell him their mum had died.

  McPhail wasn’t close to his family. There was no animosity but no real affection either. He hadn’t even told his sister that he had gotten divorced. Dad had died six? seven? years previously and now mum had joined him. And it turned out there was a will, and there was something for McPhail in it.

  It wasn’t a huge inheritance or anything. His parents had been comfortable- more comfortable than he’d known, as it turned out- but not rich. At the time, though, it was a life-changing sum of money for McPhail.

  It wasn’t the kind of money that let you buy a ship outright. But now he had money that would let you own enough of a ship that it was almost like it was yours. McPhail could have owned more of a ship if he’d gotten something smaller but he needed plenty room inside so he purchased something old, ugly, tatty and big. Small crew cab, all storage space. Then he and his team went into the salvage business.

  That was the short version of the story. That was still a lot more than McPhail told most people.

  Not that he guarded any secrets, he just didn’t need people to know much about him. He didn’t like to talk and he didn’t much like to listen to the kind of things that people normally wanted to talk at you about. People did sometimes have interesting things to tell you but rarely face to face. To find the interesting stuff you had to go looking.

  McPhail was a lurker of some horrendous message boards. Not usually anything immoral or specifically hateful, just conspiracy-brained shut-in fantasising. McPhail rarely believed any of it. He was a sceptical man by nature, though becoming less so as he grew old and saw more of just how strange the universe could be.

  Usually the nonsense folk shared on the boards was just rubbish. Conspiracy theories and ghost stories dressed up as something not supernatural and people just making stuff up for attention. Very occasionally it could point you in the direction of something interesting. Or, you’d trip up on some hokum someone had left lying around and stumble onto something else. And then that might lead you somewhere interesting.

  There was a set of co-ordinates that he kept coming across. It came up again and again. Not usually the co-ordinates themselves but references to them. You just had to allude to them and people would know where you meant. People talked about this particular location as being the source for ‘ghost signals’ that people would occasionally pick up as they passed through this one specific area. Or that people who were messing about with extremely long-range scanning equipment would detect. It was usually guys who had done jaunts on haulage craft who reported catching these odd signals.

  Posting the actual co-ordinates was a good way to make your post or even your account disappear, so most people referred to it as UZB-76.

  The location wasn’t on a commonly used route but there was sometimes cause to detour one of the usual paths when there was a particularly inconvenient confluence of several irregular bodies that made it impassable. If you had to take a detour off that detour for some reason you would probably take a route that had become notorious amongst hauler crews. You always saw folk talking about how it was ‘cursed’ and sharing the stories about incidents they claimed to have witnessed- or that someone they knew had- whilst traversing this particular stretch of space.

  People who had killed bunkmates out of the blue for no reason. Things going wrong with ships that had sailed through their last inspections. “It’s got something wrong with it,” people would say “there’s something weird out there. That’s why it’s not used as the normal route.” There was no other reason to explain why it wasn’t used. The space was pretty empty and not difficult to navigate. But it wasn’t an area you passed through unless unusual circumstances required it. For ships that had to venture through there was a notable increase in deaths on board, mechanical failure, ships getting inexplicably lost.

  McPhail enjoyed such stories, though his own theory of what was going on in the area was not as exciting.

  It seemed to McPhail that if there was a path ships only took if they had to re-route off an already less-than-optimal alternative path, a detour off a detour, there would be increased incidence of violence on board ships that had to take that path. Sailors who were increasingly bored and stressed on a lengthening and less lucrative jaunt would get on each other’s nerves. And it made sense that more ships would lose their way on a route that was less travelled and therefore less mapped and less familiar.

  Similarly it became more likely that a ship would have mechanical problems on a journey that had lengthened unexpectedly.

  The same circumstances mostly explained why sailors on this particular trail would pick up the ‘ghost signal’ you saw posts about.

  Sailors who were bored, having to pass more times than expected, maybe losing access to the pipes they’d been using to get entertainment, would start scanning around for other signals. Maybe widening the bands they were searching, maybe just paying more attention to their devices while they scanned. And they would notice the odd, unexpected- unexplained?- things that they were picking up. Signals that shouldn’t be there, because there wasn’t supposed to be anything in this area that would be signalling.

  A little while after he got divorced and lost his latest job, needing something to do, McPhail had started investigating the co-ordinates that everyone nicknamed UZB-76. At first he found nothing other than people’s ghost stories and conspiracy theories. Nothing other than the silly and creepy stuff. But McPhail was in a highly motivated phase. He knew that there were lots of things a very motivated man could apply himself to and most of them were disagreeable.

  He was still working, of course, he had to keep some money coming in. At first he would pick up some work on building sites. In his free time he’d be too tired to do anything but eat a little, wash himself and his clothes and sleep to recover for his next shift. Then he got an in to some environmental consulting which meant he had some energy left for his own pursuits, and also he could do his personal pursuing while he was supposed to be working. Spending hours and hours and days reading reams of extremely questionable message board postings was not a good use of his time but it was comparatively benign. He had to keep himself busy. And he was allowed to have some fun.

  He did believe people were picking up signals. The accounts had some consistency. The explanation, he thought, would be too boring for the spooky story fans but was quite exciting to him, because it related to an area of work he’d been considering going into. There wasn’t anyone or anything signalling from there now, but there had been. There might not be any records of it but at some point some company had had an interest in the area. They had done some exploratory visits at least and maybe stayed a while. Then they had decided to leave. Maybe quickly. They’d left stuff behind. It happened a lot. A company would send first probes and then maybe mech surveyors, and then humans to a moon or an asteroid or something that seemed like it would be worth the massive investment of trucking tonnes of equipment and people out to start digging or blasting bits off of it. Sometimes- quite a lot of the time- when you scratched deeper than the surface it all turned out to be a near incalculably vast waste of time and money ‘cause you just had a dusty lump of rock with no interesting minerals in it. So then you had to ship everybody and everything that was worth keeping back to where they had come from. Or, more likely, on to another lump of rock somewhere that you had a good feeling about. A lot of the time a lot of stuff get left behind.

  McPhail had a thought that for fun and profit it would be a good wheeze to traipse around these missteps and rake through the junk and detritus of other people’s failed endeavours. He bet he could find all kinds of interesting stuff. Probably some valuable stuff.

  McPhail had been reading some imaginaut’s pamphlet-length forum post about how Berry-Rathcoote had started to lay infrastructure for a mining operation on Kore and abandoned it because the moon was haunted. McPhail was quite certain that Kore was not haunted but it got him thinking: how would you know if a company had had an interest somewhere in the past and abandoned it?

  McPhail put pins in the co-ordinates of a few sites that he was confident were scrapped extraction projects. All places that there wasn’t any easily-accessed information about but enough forum talk about spooky signals and weird phenomena in the area had highlighted them as potential areas of interest. A little bit of corporate forensics identified the ones that it seemed likely had been developed before they were abandoned.

  It was just a hobby and his list of targets was really just a wishlist until McPhail got his unexpected inheritance. Then suddenly he had damn near his own ship and the wishlist was a to-do list. McPhail was pretty sure he had identified some places that no-one else would have picked over yet. There was no reason to stay and nothing left to do other than decide which one to check out first.

  He sent his ex-wife, who was still his best friend after all, her share of the money and a description of his plans for the next couple of decades of his life. He knew she’d be a bit envious, which he wanted, and he also wanted someone to know what had happened if it was the last thing anyone ever heard from him.

  ----------

  “You busy, Hesper?” asked McPhail.

  “Not really. Looking at local sales listings,” said Hesper. “Not sure what sort of human trade they have here.”

  McPhail rubbed at his beard. “You’re not really planning to sell Orson,” he said.

  “Will if the price is right,” insisted Hesper.

  “Care to take a look at something?” asked McPhail. “Might be nothing,”

  Hesper was immediately focused on McPhail. He wouldn’t bother her with anything that wasn’t important, unlike the constant tumble of nonsense and lies from everyone else. She was inclined to assume it was something if McPhail had decided to bring it to her attention. “What is it?” she asked him.

  McPhail put one of the scanner views from the console onto the large screen above. “See here, on medium range?” he asked. Hesper looked. She saw nothing. A shadow on the scan, a blank area where there was no data. It wasn’t identifying that something was there, just that it couldn’t tell what was in that position a few miles behind them. Holding that position a few miles behind them.

  “Okay,” she said. “I see. I see that I can’t see. Is this a live view?”

  “It is live,”

  “How long has that been there?”

  McPhail started tapping away at the console. “First noticed it five days ago. Then three days ago. This was the first sign.”

  McPhail replaced the live medium-range view on the screen with the archived one from five days previous. “It was there, see?”

  McPhail pointed to the playback of the scan he’d put up. You could see the little representation of the AGMG in the centre of the screen and right over on the edge, the bottom right hand corner, a shadow. Nothing most people would even notice. Hesper believed McPhail had, though.

  “I didn’t see it the day after that,” McPhail continued. “But then it was behind us again on the third day. A little closer. That was when I realised I’d seen it before. See? There it was.”

  Hesper nodded. It had been there. Getting nearer to them. Still just a shadow on the scan. The scan not giving any more information than ‘there’s something here’.

  “And then the next day,” said McPhail. He put up that day’s scan recording. The shadow still there and getting closer. “I was going to mention it to you then,” said McPhail. “Something came up. It was waiting for us when we left. See?”

  Hesper did see.

  “And this is today,”

  McPhail changed the view again.

  “Okay.” said Hesper.

  “I wanted to be sure before I said anything.” said McPhail.

  Hesper looked at the screen. She reached past McPhail to the controls and toggled between today’s view and the previous one.

  “Right,” she said. “I think at this point we can be pretty sure.”

  “Mmm.” said McPhail. “How do you want to proceed?”

  “With caution.” said Hesper. “If they’re happy just creeping along behind us, I’m happy enough to let them, for now. But if they start creeping a little closer…”

  “I’ll keep an eye on it,” said McPhail.

  ----------

  “Hey.” said Pallas suddenly from outside Orson’s bunk. “Guess what.”

  “No.”

  “Can I come in? I mean, can I open the curtain?”

  Orson huffed irritably. He was uncomfortable and grumpy. He had been trying to distract himself from being hungry, trying to either fall asleep or successfully knock one out. He’d completely failed in all three.

  “Yes, you can come in,” he told the robot unenthusiastically, pausing his video and stowing his handheld into the wall-pocket. Pallas pulled the bunk curtain aside and stared in at him. It was sitting cross-legged on the corridor floor. “I bet you can’t guess what I’ve got for you.”

  Orson agreed. He didn’t even want to try.

  “We came close enough to something big earlier that I got a decent connection and guess what I picked up?”

  “Did you really?” said Orson.

  “Mm-hm. Yep.” Pallas nodded, pleased with itself. “Would you like to watch?”

  “Yeah, great!” said Orson. “Thank you very much,”

  The machine nodded, face solemn.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  “Do you...want to watch with me?”offered Orson reluctantly.

  Pallas was rummaging around in all its pockets for something. “No,” it said. “All he does is sit on the couch and yap, yap, yap. You can watch by yourself. Where’s my- oh, got it.”

  She drew out the pink-and-green lead she used to plug herself into things and started poking at the side of her head to find the data port (she seemed to never remember where it was.) “Get your handheld and I’ll download the file onto it for you,”

  Orson pulled his handheld off the wall and passed it over. He was pathetically excited. It had been days since he saw new PlugPuller content. He felt cut off from the real world.

  “Oh, hey!” he said, thrilled. The title of PresidentPlugPuller’s latest livecast was ‘Daintree CRUSH Mech Workers’s Strike with VIOLENCE and arrests’

  “He talked about what happened at my work,” said Orson. “I can’t wait to see what he said about it.”

  “Why?” Asked Pallas. “You were there, weren’t you? You saw what happened. Why do you need to watch a video about it?”

  “Well, I want to see what he thinks about what happened.”

  Pallas changed its mind and decided it also wanted to see what PresidentPlugPuller said about Orson’s work. They both traipsed up to the flight deck to watch on a bigger screen. Pallas plugged itself into the console. “Gimme a sec…” it said. “There we go.”

  PresidentPlugPuller appeared on the screen, paused, sitting on his couch as usual. Orson’s insides twisted with nerves. “Great,” he said, mouth dry. He wasn’t sure what was making him anxious. The video started to play.

  “Obviously the only thing I’m going to be talking about today is the horrendous attack by Daintree on their mech workers the Dunbar hub,” said the young man onscreen. Orson fidgeted. “I’m sure most of you have seen reports about this already.” continued PresidentPlugPuller.“This was a planned strike, planned for ages. The mech workers’ demands were totally reasonable. But still Daintree decided to call the strike disorderly and illegal and call in station security to suppress it. Disgusting heavy-handed tactics. And Daintree didn’t only use station security. They had hired extra outside teams who were already there. Daintree had been planning to crack down with violence on this strike,”

  Orson’s eyes were wide. He hadn’t known that.

  “We don’t know everything yet but we do know that every single mech worker at the Dunbar facility was carted off in a prisoner transport ship. A prisoner transport which was also already standing by.”

  “No way…” said Orson, thrilled. Pallas looked over at him.

  “So Daintree were planning- had planned- to have their entire machine workforce removed into custody,” continued PlugPuller. He paused to have a sip of his usual protein drink. “We know Daintree did this ‘cause their mech workers dared to strike. But what are Daintree saying was the reason for suppressing this strike?”

  More things that Orson didn’t know. This was exciting.

  “Daintree’s story is that the strike was illegal because a human worker took part in the action. The only human worker at the fulfilment centre.”

  Orson felt everything swim. His vision greyed. Even though he was sitting down he reached out a hand to steady himself on the console.

  “I know.” said PresidentPlugPuller. “The alarms are going off already. There’s this one single human worker, and this one guy wrecks the strike, I know what you’re thinking-”

  please don’t be me please don’t be me please don’t be me is what Orson was thinking.

  “-Was this guy a company plant or a dupe? ‘Cause it’s going to be one of those. Either Daintree put him in there to wreck the strike and he knew what he was doing or he’s just a moron and they tricked him into wrecking the strike,”

  “Which do you think it was?” asked Pallas. Orson looked at the robot, wondering if it was joking. He didn’t think it joked. “Pallas, it’s me,” he said. “He’s talking about me.”

  “Do you think so?” said Pallas. “Oh, well you were a dupe, then.”

  Orson stared at her. “Oh, look!” she said suddenly. “It is you!”

  Orson looked back at the screen to see- horrifyingly- his own stupid face staring back at him. Only the very low resolution of the image softened the utter slap in the face shock of it. It was his work ID. PresidentPlugPuller had his work ID up on screen to show to all his viewers.

  “Orson Foster,” said PlugPuller. Hearing his own name coming out of his favourite livecaster’s mouth, his face on the screen, was maybe the strangest experience of Orson’s life so far and definitely the worst. He noticed that he hadn’t heard anything PresidentPlugPuller had said after his name.

  “-ven years, according to what we could find out. He’s been there for so long. Always in the same job. Zero advancement. And that doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who Daintree would be using to do something like this, you know?”

  The airlock downstairs was starting to seem inviting to Orson.

  “If he’d been in that warehouse for less than a year I would have no doubt at all that Daintree put him in there specifically for this,” said PlugPuller. “It would be a hundred percent definite. But if this Orson Foster is the guy, and he’s been there for that long...seven years in the same place, doing the same thing...I dunno. It makes me think that maybe what we’ve heard so far about this guy isn’t accurate,”

  “Is it accurate?” asked Pallas.

  “Yes.” said Orson.

  “But we’ll find out anyway. There’s going to be more and more information coming out about this story and everyone’s eyes are on this guy now,”

  Orson sat rigid in his seat, staring straight ahead.

  PresidentPlugPuller stretched in his seat and then leaned back in towards his camera. “I’m pretty sure that this guy here-” he pointed at Orson’s ID on the screen- “Is the person who wrecked the strike, though. Even if the other information we’ve got about him isn’t right.”

  PlugPuller looked away onto one of his other screens. “We got this video, taken from the security cameras at the back of the facility. If you see here on the video- see, this is out the back of the warehouse. You see the security team here coming out with a stretcher. You can see the guy they’re carrying, fat guy, he’s dressed like a guy who works in a warehouse, hi-vis stuff.”

  PlugPuller paused the video. “It does look like he’s injured. Or they’ve made it look like he is and they’ve gone kind of over the top. That’s a whole bucket of fake blood they’ve thrown over him. Or they’ve almost killed their own guy for real which, it’s Daintree, believable that they would do that. Either way, they carry him out, dying or looking like he’s dying. And they put him straight into the prisoner transport which is, let’s note, already there, look at the time stamp. They were all set, ready to just arrest everybody.”

  PresidentPlugPuller leaned back, looking at the comments his viewers were furiously typing into the live text chat. He played the video again and watched it silently for a few more seconds. “Oh, yeah, and his dick is out in the video. I don’t know what that’s all about.”

  Simon paused the security video again and zoomed in on it. “Just flapping about down there.” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe they pulled his dick out so everyone would censor the footage. That might be it. They’re trying to prevent the video being widely broadcast. Yeah, that’s probably it.”

  ----------

  “It’s the most convenient way for you to pay off your debt to us,” explained Hesper. She took the spoon out of her mug and licked some of the oily black instant coffee granules off it. Orson flinched.

  “I don’t see why I have to…” he began, leaning forward onto the small galley table. Hesper clattered her spoon back into her mug and slammed it down very close to his ear. Orson jumped and sat upright again.

  “We already discussed all this. You don’t think you owe us anything?”

  Hesper walked across the galley- about two steps- and clicked on the kettle.

  Orson could feel his cheeks reddening. He wrapped his arms around his belly. “. I said you can have all my...whatever’s in here,”

  “You think that’ll cover everything you’ve cost us?” said Hesper. “How much do you think the stuff you’ve got in there is worth?”

  Orson shrugged.. How would he know? He wasn’t the one who sold the things that grew inside him. He had never bought a fresh arm-sleeve of skin or a new eye or anything. He’d always assumed the organs and things he grew were pretty valuable. “No idea,” he said.

  “You never thought to ask how much they were selling those things for?” scoffed Hesper. “The things they were making you grow inside your own body? It’s not that much.”

  Orson shrugged. “I don’t really...care. It’s not my money,”

  “It’s definitely not, is it? It’s your body, though.”

  Orson looked down at himself. “I just have to live here.” he said. “I’m not that attached.”

  Hesper just looked at him. “Well,” she said. “Unless you figure out a way to separate yourself from it, you and your body are going to have to do some work.”

  Orson sighed. “So...what happens at these ‘Free2Work’ places?”

  “All kinds of things. Farming, mining, some manufacturing. We take you to one and they give us a percentage of your debt. Like, most of it but minus fees and costs and blah blah. You stay there and work until you’ve paid it all back. It’s really very convenient and straightforward.”

  “I guess,” said Orson.

  “You just live there in the facility. They provide your accommodation and meals so you don’t have to worry about finding somewhere to stay.”

  “Okay,” said Orson. “That’s cool.”

  “Yeah.” said Hesper. “Cool.”

  “What’s cool?” said Atesthas, wandering into the galley. He was wearing a fluffy pink dressing-gown and looked as though he’d just woken up. “Are you making coffee?”

  He flopped down onto the seat next to Orson. His dressing-gown fell open a bit. Orson tried not to stare. “Yes,” said Hesper. “Would the captain like some coffee?”

  Atesthas nodded. He yawned extravangantly, leaning over onto Orson slightly. Hesper opened up one of the small overhead cupboards to get another mug. “How are you feeling?” she asked Atesthas.

  “Great.” he said. He turned to Orson and offered a hand. “We haven’t really met yet,” he said. “Atesthas, or Captain Allan, or captain. Atesthas is fine.”

  “Orson,” said Orson. He had to shift around on the seat to attempt a handshake and he only really managed to grab fingers. Very poor. The captain didn’t seem to care, though, if he noticed. “What were you two talking about?” asked Atesthas.

  “Orson’s future employment prospects,” said Hesper. She unscrewed the top off a jar of the worst instant coffee in the whole universe. “One scoop or two?”

  Atesthas yawned again. “Two.” he said. “Do you need a job, Orson?”

  “Yes,” said Hesper before Orson could say anything. “He needs to pay us back for rescuing him,”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Atesthas. “You sort of told me what happened. You were working at a Daintree warehouse, Orson?”

  “Fulfilment centre,”

  “So you’ve got adjuncts and whatnot, you’re mechanically enhanced,”

  Orson reflexively presented his arms, rotating his fists in front of him. “Wee bit,” he said. “it’s all deactivated, though.”

  “Mm. And it’s Daintree proprietary stuff so no-one will dare to jailbreak it even if they could,”

  Orson shrugged. “Probably?”

  Atesthas tucked the dressing-gown around him and patted his body gently through it. “That’s why I can’t get fixed. Military adjuncts are Daintree, too,”

  “You were in the army?” asked Orson. “Is that what happened to you, you were injured in combat?”

  “I would’ve thought you’d have filled him in on my backstory,” said the captain, looking over at Hesper. She was adding some white powder to the coffee cups and didn’t look round. “No,” she said. “I knew he’d be extremely tiresome about it so I left it for you to talk to him about.”

  “Okay,” said Atesthas, looking at Orson.

  “Here’s a cheat code if you need it, Captain,” said Hesper. “Say material conditions,”

  “Well, it was material conditions that made him join the military,” said Orson. “I know that,”

  “It wasn’t my material conditions,” said Atesthas. “It was stupidity. I wanted to be a jet pilot.”

  “Oh, is that how you ended up being a ship captain?” asked Orson. “You were a military pilot, and then you left the military and-”

  “No,” said Atesthas. “I found out that you don’t learn to fly planes by joining the army, you learn to fly planes by having your parents teach you in one of their planes by the time you’re ten.”

  “Ah,” said Orson. “And your parents didn’t have any planes to teach you flying in?”

  “No,” said Atesthas.

  “Plebs,” said Hesper, grinning. She was leaning against the counter, spoon in hand. “Someone should really tell you poor people that it’s much better to join the military as a well-off person. It’s really not a good idea if you’re a povvo, you’ll have a terrible time,”

  Atesthas grunted.

  “Well, exactly,” said Orson. “The corpos lie and give people the idea that you’ll get to do cool stuff like fly planes so that they sign up. Ever since the machines brained-up and Business had to start using humans to do all the martial-industrial work they’ve had to find ways to coerce and trick people into letting themselves be made into murderers,”

  Hesper and Atesthas both snorted with laughter. “So dramatic,” said Hesper. “Murderers,”

  Orson felt his cheeks redden. “Well, you do have to murder people,” he said. “In the army,” he added.

  “There’s really not very much murdering,” said Atesthas. “I didn’t even see any combat,”

  “You didn’t?” Orson frowned at him. “Then what happened to your-?”

  He indicated the captain’s body with a wagging finger.

  “Plane crash,” said Hesper.

  “I thought you didn’t get to fly planes?” said Orson.

  “I wasn’t flying it,” said Atesthas.

  “Ah, right.” said Orson, blushing more. “What happened?”

  “Don’t remember.” said Atesthas. “I remember getting on the plane and then I woke up in bed wishing I was dead”

  “His plane was shot down,” supplied Hesper. “By ?gr?i militants.”

  Atesthas shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know,”

  “Almost certainly,” insisted Hesper, “It was right-”

  “Wait,” said Orson. “Where were you?”

  “Vu-Murt,”

  “Callisto?”

  Hesper sighed. “Here we go…”. She turned her attention back to coffee-making; the kettle had boiled.

  “Sure, yeah.” said Atesthas. “ Vu-murt, Callisto, whatever you prefer to call it,”

  “It matters, what you call it,” said Orson pompously. “You were stationed on Callisto, really?”

  “Yeah,” said Atesthas. “What of it?”

  “I can’t believe you were actually there,” said Orson.

  “Why not? In the army you go where you’re sent. Lots of us went there.”

  “So I’ve heard,” said Orson.

  “Have you heard about how boring it was?” asked Atesthas. “How all we did for months, years, was patrol roads and pipelines? We were just security guards with no-one around to guard against. It wasn’t very interesting.”

  “The story I’ve heard is horrific,” said Orson with self-righteous pleasure. “I can’t believe you can say it was boring,”

  “Oh, sure,” said Atesthas. “Lots of guys snapped and killed the rest of their section but that’s a thing that happens everywhere. I think it did happen more often on Vu-Murt than some other places…”

  “I’m not concerned with squaddies offing each other,” said Orson. “Well, I am, of course, that’s terrible too but I’m more concerned with the things you were all there doing to the indigenous people,”

  Hesper groaned. “There aren’t indigenous people, good grief, the only place there were ever indigenous people was on old Earth,”

  “Locals then, Callistoan people.” said Orson. “The communities established by the first humans that settled there. You know what I mean,”

  “Didn’t see any,” said Atesthas. “No sign at all. No interaction with anyone that I even heard of.”

  “This doesn’t make sense,” said Orson. “You were on Callisto and you say you were just a security guard and nothing happened and there was no fighting?” said Orson. “And also you say you were on a plane that was shot down by ?gr?i?”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Atesthas mildly.

  “That was the official report,” said Hesper.

  “Oh!” said Orson. “Well, then it must be true. Even though ?gr?i rebels didn’t have anything that could shoot down a military aircraft…”

  Hesper came over to the table with two cups of coffee. She set one down in front of Atesthas. “It wasn’t a military aircraft he was in,” she said. “It was a small unarmed civilian plane, flying low. That was how they were able to target it successfully,”

  “How do you know about this?” asked Orson, reaching for the other coffee cup. Hesper stepped back and took a sip from it. “It was a very widely-reported incident,” she said. “I would have thought that you would know about it, being so interested in the situation on Callisto,”

  “Wait,” said Orson. “That was the crash you were in? The one they used as an excuse to start bombing refugee camps near Norov-Ava? That was you? ”

  Atesthas shrugged.

  “They said all the soldiers in that plane died,”

  “They thought I did die,” said Atesthas. “I must have crawled away from the wreckage. Some students found me in the desert and took me to their place. That’s why I was never AWOL. That’s why they never looked for me.”

  “Lucky for him,” said Hesper.

  Orson looked incensed. “So you just walked away from it all, hid, never spoke out or told the truth or anything about a crash that was used to justify bombing thousands of-”

  Hesper swallowed a mouthful of coffee and groaned.

  “What difference would it make?” said Atesthas reasonably. “I appear on some news stream and say, oh, that crash that you say killed six civilians but everybody’s pretty much known for years that it was soldiers, well it was soldiers but actually it killed five and a Daintree executive and I was on the plane too and I survived but I can’t prove any of it. What would that change?”

  Orson shook his head. “You don’t have any problem at all with just keeping schtum and walking away from the whole thing?”

  “Like you’re doing, you mean?” said Atesthas. “Shouldn’t you hand yourself over to authorities to give your account of the riot?

  “It wasn’t a riot,” said Orson.

  “The riot that led to an entire warehouse of mechs being arrested and then disappeared? Shouldn’t you hand yourself in and say, I was there, here’s what happened?”

  Orson’s face was very red. “It’s hardly the same thing,” he said. “I woke up with no idea what was going on, with these strange people who had taken me somewhere I didn’t even know…”

  “Yes…” said Atesthas. “And a big gap in your memory and people telling you what happened but it doesn’t seem to make sense and you don’t know if they’re lying to you or if they don’t know what happened either…”

  “It’s a completely different situation,” said Orson. “You can’t make out that what happened to me is the same as what you did. I was just at work and suddenly all this stuff just dropped on top of me out of nowhere.”

  “I was just at work!” said Atesthas. “And then suddenly, well, I was the stuff that dropped out of nowhere,”

  “It’s not the same.” said Orson. “You had put yourself in that situation,”

  “No I didn’t,” said Atesthas. “You go where you’re sent when you’re in the army,”

  “You put yourself into the army,” said Orson. “So you des-”

  He paused and corrected himself. “You had to expect things like that to happen,”

  “Just say he deserved it,” said Hesper.

  “We both worked for the same company!” said Atesthas. “And I left way before you did. You were still a Daintree employee three...five??... days ago. We were both Daintree employees, just in different departments. You could have easily ended up in the military, too,”

  Hesper and Orson both looked doubtful.

  “...Nah,” said Orson.

  “Aye, maybe not,” said Atesthas. “You should have ended up in the extractive side of things. It’s dead odd that they made you a warehouse worker. How many humans do Daintree put into warehouses as manual handlers?”

  “On Dunbar, just me,” said Orson.

  “Just you!” laughed Atesthas. “You didn’t think that was weird?”

  “I thought it was lucky,” said Orson.

  “Extremely lucky,” said Atesthas. “Or...I’m guessing you’ve got family who levered you in there,”

  Orson shook his head. “No. I would assume that, too, but no. Just luck.”

  “Or a mistake.” said Hesper, rolling the coffee cup between her hands. “Or a joke.”

  “That’s still luck.” said Orson. “For me,”

  “There’s no such thing as luck.” said Hesper.firmly. “Stupid idea. It’s very funny that you say you think you have it, Orson.”

  “He doesn’t,” said Atesthas. “He made better decisions than me, because he’s a better person. That’s what he really thinks.”

  Orson shook his head. It hurt. He really needed some coffee. “I’ve never made a good decision in my life,” he said. “I just like to think that if Daintree had sent me to Callisto to kill the people living there, it wouldn’t have taken almost dying in a plane crash to get me to desert.”

  “You’re giving yourself too much credit,” said Hesper.

  “I said that’s what I like to think.” said Orson. “I’m sure I’d disappoint myself. But we don’t know, ‘cause I didn’t join the army so I never ended up in that situation. And we do know that that’s what it took for him.”

  Orson looked at Atesthas. Atesthas sipped his coffee.

  “What I really like to think,” said Orson, “Is that I would’ve refused to go in the first place. That’s what I would hope I would do. But I never had to.”