Chapter 7 - Just Business

  Darius leaned back against his seat in the transport, watching the industrial sprawl of Exeter station’s outskirts blur past. The buildings here looked like they’d been left out in the elements too long—rust peeling in jagged patches along the edges, every structure slouched as though they were tired of their own existence.

  Caldera IV didn’t have much of an atmosphere, but what it did have was ever so slightly corrosive. Nothing dangerous to the workers – or so the Empire claimed, anyway – but enough to cut down on the lifespan of any material left exposed to the elements. Parts wore down quicker, nothing looked new for long, and the less said about the smell of rapidly decomposing trash, the better.

  He’d been here for years, and it still caught him off guard sometimes.

  The Freeholders’ transport – a boxy, old two-seater with all the charm of a cement block – jostled over a crack in the road, the engine shuddering in what he could only assume was protest. It looked like the sort of vehicle that had started its life as “serviceable” and then worked its way down the ladder of quality and functionality from there. Still, the thing ran, and that was more than he could say for half the personal vehicles he’d seen in the district.

  Next to him sat Voss, who seemed about as thrilled as he was with the cramped interior, though it was hard to tell with her. She kept her attention on the road ahead, barely sparing him a glance since they’d left. The two other Freeholders who’d escorted him through the alleys to the transport – still strangers to him – were squashed into the rear cargo compartment. They were better off than he’d have expected, though; the cargo area was surprisingly well-designed and spacious. One of the men was perched on an old crate, tapping at his datapad, while the other was leaning against a stack of supplies with an exceptionally bored expression on his face.

  The transport slowed to a stop in front of what looked like an abandoned warehouse tucked away between two crumbling factories. The structure was squat and unassuming; its once-sturdy metal walls faded and scarred with streaks of rust. It was all but indistinguishable from any of the other buildings they had passed on the way – which, Darius guessed, was the point.

  The others hopped out with ease, suggesting they were used to the place. Kara gave him a brief nod, jerking her chin toward a side door. “Inside. Let’s go.”

  He followed, keeping his curiosity in check. No one else looked particularly interested in making conversation, and he wasn’t in a hurry to break the silence. As they entered, the chill of Caldera’s outside air gave way to the musty, almost metallic smell of the interior. The lighting was dim, provided by a few scattered bulbs hung from exposed beams and the occasional glow of a portable lamp.

  Someone had set up makeshift workstations here and there—rough wooden tables piled with scattered parts, an ancient-looking terminal, a few tool kits spilling bolts and washers. A stack of crates lined one wall, their markings scrubbed off, save for one corner where a faded manufacturer’s logo could still be made out.

  “Take a look around,” one of the men who’d escorted him here – Darius still hadn’t caught his name – said, gesturing with a lazy wave of his hand. “We don’t exactly roll out the welcome mat here.”

  A couple of the Freeholders went about their business, ignoring him completely. One of them, a wiry man with short, greying hair, gave him a brief nod as he passed, hauling a crate from the transport onto one of the tables with a grunt. “You know your way around a ration pack?” he asked, jerking his head toward the stacks.

  “Uh, yeah,” Darius replied after a brief look around to make sure the man was talking to him.

  “Great. Get stacking.”

  Darius spent a moment wondering if he should feel offended by the brusk command before shrugging to himself and walking over to the table to start helping the man arrange the supplies. Not like he had anything better to do – and he was well aware of Voss’s intense gaze on his back. Probably a good idea to put his best foot forward.

  “So, how long’s this place been home sweet home?” Darius ventured, tossing a ration pack onto the stack. His question hung in the air for a moment, met only by the continued sound of rustling supplies and the scrape of a crate on concrete.

  The man next to him—he hadn’t introduced himself—let out a dry chuckle, shaking his head. “Long enough,” he said, with a vague shrug that could’ve meant anything. “Nothing fancy, but it does the job.”

  “Looks cozy,” Darius replied, glancing around. “You get many visitors out here?”

  “Not if we can help it.” The man’s answer was quick, his tone clipped. He gave Darius a long look, as if trying to decide how much more he felt like sharing. “You’re new, aren’t you? Most people around here aren’t so… curious.”

  Darius caught the hint and let the subject drop, turning back to the pile of ration packs. They were the cheap, mass-produced kind – the type that had a shelf-life spanning decades and tasted just a little worse than plain cardboard.

  He hated to say it – and wasn’t stupid enough to say it out loud – but he was kinda… disappointed. Not just in the food, though that was disappointing all on its own, but in what he had seen of the operation so far. For all that he had his problems with the Freeholder movement as a whole, there had still been an expectation of some grand conspiracy working against the tyrannical rule of the Empire.

  From the looks of things here, it was clear they weren’t in the middle of some grand operation – there were no weapons on display, no complex equipment or caches of black market supplies. If he’d actually signed up because he believed in the ‘cause’, he might have been a little put out. As it was, with a little luck his partnership with the Freeholders would consist of laying low for a few weeks before he could get back to his everyday life.

  Darius was careful to avoid thinking about how likely things were to work out that way.

  {If this location is indicative of the resources the Freeholder organisation can access, my mission may be more difficult than anticipated.}

  Echo’s voice came out of nowhere, startling Darius into fumbling a ration pack. The man stacking supplies beside him raised an eyebrow, but he just shrugged, giving an awkward smile. “Whoops. Slipped.”

  The man gave him a dubious look and shuffled a little further away. Darius quietly resigned himself to being seen as a weirdo from here on out. If this ‘Echo’ was going to be sticking around, he really needed to figure out a way to communicate in public without further destroying the tattered remains of his reputation.

  At this point, Darius really wasn’t sure if he preferred it when Echo was quiet, or when he was chiming in. On the one hand, silence was golden. On the other hand, when the thing was quiet he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was shifting through his augs, worming its way deeper into his body.

  He suppressed a full-body shiver at the thought. It was the same kind of… icky feeling he got whenever thinking about the more impactful augments. Financial status aside, he wasn’t sure if he could ever make such significant changes to his body like that. The ocular and auditory implants were small enough that he didn’t mind them too much, but anything further was outside his comfort zone.

  The unloading of the transport didn’t take much longer, and by the end of it Darius was torn between irritation and amusement. It felt a little like he was just being used as free labour, but at the same time, the mundanity of unloading boxes in what was ostensibly a secret base tickled his funny bone.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Before he could spend more than a few seconds looking around awkwardly now that the task was finished, Voss’s voice cut through the dull hum of the room. “Alright, Kallan, you’re done here. Follow me, we need to talk.”

  Darius blinked, walking over towards where she was waiting and trying to shake the vague impression that he was being called to the principal’s office. She led him past the worn-out partitions to her office—a cramped, rough-looking corner sectioned off by haphazardly assembled plasteel dividers.

  Inside, she took a seat behind her desk and gestured for him to sit opposite. The setup was about as welcoming as a mechanic’s closet; the chair she’d indicated was rickety and visibly uncomfortable. Voss didn’t wait for him to get settled before leaning back and meeting his eyes, her gaze level and intense.

  “You are a problem,” she said bluntly, her gaze steady as she drummed her fingers once against the metal edge of the desk. “I don’t know who you are, what you want, or where your loyalties may lie. Finn vouched for you – and he’s proven that he’s reliable, which is why you’re here at all – but if I’m going to be trusting you to stick around and keep your mouth shut, I need more than that.”

  Darius cleared his throat nervously. “Yeah, that’s… fair enough, I guess. Uh… I’m going to be honest, though; I don’t really know how to convince you that I’m not going to sell you out.” A distant part of his brain helpfully informed him that he was doing an excellent job of arguing against himself.

  {I suggest a different negotiating tactic.}

  Darius tried to keep from reacting to the sudden voice in his ear with mixed success. Across from him, Voss raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, if nothing else, I suppose that establishes that you would make for a terrible spy,” she commented dryly. Darius managed a weak smile and half a shrug, as if to say what can you do? He might have been imagining things, but he could have sworn the corner of her mouth twitched upwards for a second.

  Voss’s gaze lingered, appraising him with a quiet intensity that made Darius shift under her scrutiny. After a beat, she continued. “All right. Let’s start simple. If you’re going to be working with us – or even just spending a few days or weeks lying low – then you should know what we’re about.” She leaned back, crossing her arms as she settled more comfortably in her chair.

  “You mentioned before that you were ‘familiar’ with our organisation. But I’d guess you don’t know the full picture. The Empire doesn’t exactly leave room for stories that don’t flatter them.”

  Darius shrugged, feigning indifference. He was more than familiar with the Empire’s “sanitised” view of things. That said, he had also heard his share of Freeholder rhetoric over the years – and from where he stood, they weren’t much better than the Empire when it came to spreading propaganda. Voss seemed to take his silence as a cue to continue.

  “Look,” she began, her tone shifting slightly. “The Empire takes. It takes, and it takes, until there’s nothing left. I’ve seen what that looks like—whole colonies stripped of everything useful. Natural resources, manpower, you name it. And the people? They’re squeezed just as dry. Places like Caldera IV don’t mean a thing to the Empire. It’s just one more resource depot. They tell us we’re part of something greater, that our work helps humanity. But what’s the reality? The core worlds live in luxury, while places like this scrape by on whatever scraps are left.”

  Darius nodded slowly, acknowledging her point. “True. That said, without the Empire, Caldera wouldn’t exist at all,” he pointed out, more for the sake of playing devil’s advocate than actually refuting her argument. “Hell, without the Empire, humanity wouldn’t have colonised more than a dozen or so systems.”

  “You’re not wrong,” Voss admitted, a flicker of amusement crossing her face at seeing his expression. “Contrary to common belief, the Freehold Alliance doesn’t hate the Empire. Oh, sure, some of us are more… passionate about things, but even the most dogmatic among us can acknowledge the role the Empire has played in humanity’s development. But,” she said, raising a finger, “That doesn’t mean the Empire doesn’t have its flaws, its failures. That doesn’t mean that it should be the only option.”

  She looked back up, her eyes hard, and Darius felt a prickle of discomfort under her gaze. “We’re not some idealistic rebel faction trying to change the galaxy. We don’t have grand visions of a revolution sweeping across the stars. We’re trying to carve out a life that the Empire doesn’t control. They won’t let us live freely, so we make our own freedom, one way or another.”

  Darius nodded, processing her words. “Why stick around, then?” he ventured, genuinely curious. “Seems like it’d be easier to just… disappear. Find somewhere far enough out of the Empire’s reach that they wouldn’t bother you.”

  Voss shook her head, a faint smirk tugging at her lips. “I’ve heard that suggestion before. But here’s the reality, Darius. No place is out of their reach. You try to vanish, to start over somewhere off the Empire’s radar, and all you’re doing is pushing off the inevitable. Maybe it’s years, maybe it’s decades, but eventually, the Empire will be there, demanding taxes, resources, loyalty. And the moment you can’t give them what they want…” She gave a slight, humourless shrug. “Well, we both know how that goes.”

  Darius leaned back in his rickety, uncomfortable chair. “You said you’re not looking to start a revolution,” he pointed out, “so why are you here at all? Trying to change the Empire from the inside or something?”

  “It’s part of it,” Voss shrugged, “But here’s the thing – I may not be able to make some grand change, and maybe no one can. But that doesn’t mean we don’t fight for the people we can help now, for the little freedoms that are still possible. Sure, we’re not shaking the foundations of the galaxy.” She paused, her gaze sharpening. “But we’re doing what we can, where we can.”

  …Interesting. Voss was saying all the right words, parroting the expected ‘we fight for what’s right, not what’s easy’ lines, but… he was getting the impression that she may not be much of a ‘true believer’ herself.

  It wasn’t anything concrete, nothing he could point to definitively, but his gut feeling was that Kara Voss had some more tangible, pragmatic reasons for doing this than she was letting on.

  Not that there was anything wrong with that, of course. In some ways, it was almost preferable – knowing that she wasn’t some kind of fanatic meant that the odds of them staying under the Empire’s radar and making intelligent moves just went up. Still, it was something to keep in mind.

  The thing about idealists is that they generally didn’t have it in them to make the hard choices. The ones that got people killed. Darius had the impression that Kara Voss wouldn’t hesitate to make those same choices – and if anyone was going to be on the chopping block first, it would be the guy she didn’t know or care about.

  {This organisation appears to be fighting for a noble cause. Perhaps we can find a way to assist them in their mission without compromising my own.}

  ‘Noble cause’. Right. Darius managed to keep his reaction to the sudden voice in his ear to a twitch, but he had to wonder if Echo’s priorities might need a little calibration. It was hard to say if the AI truly believed Voss’s speech or if it was just running on limited data. Either way, he wasn’t about to let a lecture drag on without getting to the point.

  “All right,” he said, cutting through the silence. “So the Freeholders are fighting the good fight for the sake of the little guy. Good for you. But what does all this mean for me, exactly? Because, and no offence, I’m not the kinda guy to sign up for a cause that even you admit might be helpless. I’m just…” he trailed off, trying to think of a way to say it that didn’t sound totally selfish. “I’m just trying to get by, you know?”

  Voss leaned back, crossing her arms as she studied him, one eyebrow raised. A flicker of something crossed her face – something like understanding, or maybe resignation. “Alright then. More of a pragmatist, are you? I can work with that.”

  She leaned forward, clasping her hands on the desk. “Here’s how this goes, Darius. While you’re here, we’re not your friends, and we’re not your keepers. We’re offering you shelter, resources, and a place to lay low until things cool down for you. In return, you’re going to help us out with some work. And no, it’s not glamorous, but it’s necessary.”

  “And what does this work entail, exactly?”

  “Tomorrow, you’ll join a squad—four people you’ll bunk with, people who know the ropes. You’ll be working alongside them for the next few days, keeping things running.” She gave him a thin smile. “Nothing dangerous. Simple maintenance, a few runs to pick up or transport supplies. Nothing that would get you noticed. But if you’re here, you’ll pull your weight.”

  Darius paused, weighing his words. He could feel the options shrinking, each one feeling less like a choice and more like the next inevitable step. “I suppose that’s fair,” he said, suddenly wishing he’d had the foresight to look more convinced by the Freeholder’s “noble struggle”. Maybe that way, he could have made things a little easier on himself. Too late for that now.

  “I’m glad you think so,” Voss returned briskly. “Now, unless you have any pressing questions, your squad leader should be waiting outside.”

  “Just one, actually,” Darius said after a moment’s hesitation. “I, ah, don’t know how long the Empire is going to be looking for me. Is there a time limit to this… arrangement?” He wasn’t sure if asking this bluntly was a good idea or not, but at this point, he figured he’d already burned some bridges. Best to figure out exactly where he stood.

  “We’ll see.” Voss’s expression wasn’t making him terribly hopeful. “As long as you’re useful, you’ll have a place. And when it’s time for you to move on, well…” She shrugged casually, flicking a finger over the dataslate on her desk as if dismissing the thought of him entirely. “That’ll depend on how you handle yourself here.”

  “Noted,” Darius replied, pushing himself up from the uncomfortable chair and giving her a brief nod. “For what it’s worth, I do appreciate you helping me out like this, considering you don’t know me.”

  Voss merely inclined her head, her attention already shifting elsewhere as he left the cramped little office, mentally kicking himself for how he had handled the situation. The wise choice would have been to keep his mouth shut and let her assume he was just another sympathetic soul looking to help “the cause.” But here he was, pegged as a pragmatist, which meant he’d be working.

  Another brilliant call from the idiot sitting in his own mess.