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  Again, I eyed Rachel, careful not to draw anyone’s attention with the look. “Anyway… How much myst does my new mine put out?”

  Ozzie grinned. “More than you could use in a million lifetimes and survive, mate.”

  “I don’t know… Miss Mason and I use an awful lot.”

  “Do you now?” Ozzie examined us with a curious look. “Let’s just say the iron production is a side job. You feel me?”

  “That’s what I like to hear,” I replied.

  “I’ll want to test the product first, and inspect a few of these sections with my own equipment. All standard procedure.”

  Ozzie eyed me, but then winked. “I got you, mate. I’ll arrange for a sample. Don’t you worry.”

  “And an inspection.”

  It was apparent that Ozzie thought I just wanted to get high. But as I pressed him for the inspection, his mood changed to more business and less pleasure.

  “You don’t trust the quality of the operation?”

  “I don’t trust anything I don’t test for myself, Mr. Oppenheimer. And if the details of what we discussed above no longer suit you, then I will find someone else to—”

  “Do your tests, mate. What do I care? Let’s just get it done.”

  “Perfect,” I said, feeling a wave of relief. “And as for getting it done, how long do you think it will take to initiate the sale?”

  “I’ll have Ino start things rolling. Couple’a days, I wager.”

  “Marvelous. In the meantime, we’ll stay aboard our ship—”

  “Nonsense,” Ozzie said. “You’ll stay in my home. It’s nice and cozy.”

  “We’ll stay on our ship until the transaction is complete,” I insisted. “No deal, no spoils. You feel me?” I asked, using the man’s tagline and raising my chin.

  “No need to get testy, Mr. McBride. I was just trying to be hospitable.”

  I was about to step away from the workstation when I noticed another bank of displays along the far wall, showing what seemed to be a camp of some kind. Miners, I guessed. Only, judging by the guards posted at the exits, the massive security doors, and what looked like motion-sensitive automated weapons in the ceiling, the scene seemed a lot more like a prison than an underground work camp.

  “What do we have over here?” I asked, moving toward the holo feeds.

  “Just our labor force, mate. Nothing to waste your time with.”

  My eyes flicked between displays, taking in as much as I could as quickly as I could. There were hundreds of workers. Maybe even a thousand, it was hard to say. Massive freight containers acted as barracks, while tents dotted the haphazard layout of the sprawling community. It truly was, as Ozzie had first said, a small city. Or at least a town. But that wasn’t what concerned me.

  As I examined the feeds further, I noticed children. Dozens of children. Some were missing hands, others used crutches to move around. They wore utility belts, gloves, and several still wore helmets, heading to or returning from a shift.

  I felt a knot turn in my stomach—something deep, like the dull ache the day after a fist fight. Ozzie wasn’t using professional miners for his myst operation; he was using slaves. And he was using children.

  “Excuse me, please,” said a small voice form a holo display to my right. A kid approached one of the guards near a large rusting door. “Mr. Overseer, sir. My mother needs the medicine now.”

  “Shut up, kid,” the man said, raising his prod.

  “Turn that off,” Ozzie said, pointing at the nearest operator.

  “No, wait,” I said, choosing my next words carefully. “I want to see how your staff deals with this… annoyance.”

  Ozzie seemed surprised, then waved off his man.

  “But you promised!” the kid continued. He couldn’t have been more than twelve. He had nappy black hair and dark skin, made all the more dusky by the soot that covered him. And while his frame was slight—still several years away from manhood—he looked sinewy and strong.

  “I said shut up, kid!” The overseer flicked his prod toward the child and released a bolt of electricity. The discharge crossed the distance with a blue flash and surged around the kid, throwing him back. His body lay on the rocky ground, shaking.

  Come on, kid, I said, willing the boy to get up. I had no idea how many amps that had been, but if it was enough to throw a person back, it was enough to kill them. Come on!

  Suddenly, the boy moved, pressing a hand into the ground and forcing himself up.

  “Yes!” I said—once again, caught off guard by my failure to stay in character. I was clearly out of practice. Since I was sure I’d drawn the attention of everyone in the command room, I continued with: “That’s how you deal with those cheeky little bastards!”

  The three operators laughed, and Ozzie grinned ear to ear. “And that’s not all we do to them, mate. Some of their women are quite a handful.”

  “I’m sure they are,” I said absently, feeling the knot in my stomach twist even tighter.

  11

  Rachel and I stood on the Horizon’s bridge, addressing a larger-than-life holo feed of Min Oragga, while Tiny sat at my feet and insisted that I scratch him as we talked.

  “The good news,” I said, “is that we seem to have convinced Oppenheimer to sell the mine to us.”

  “Well done,” Oragga said. “How hard was that to do?”

  “Thanks to Lars’s quick thinking,” Rachel said, “Flint was able to play on the man’s weakness.”

  “Which was?”

  “Offering him his old life back,” I said.

  “As a syndicate hitman,” Rachel added.

  Oragga nodded. “The life he had stripped from him has become your leverage point. Well played.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “But, again, Lars deserves the credit.”

  “While I recognize that as a genuine gesture of kindness,” Lars said, “please note that I lack an ego. Therefore, the designation of credit, as it were, is a meaningless placeholder.”

  “Well,” I said, pulling up the waist of my cargo pants, “call it what you want. And call me an old-fashioned place-holding kind of guy, but you’d better get used to it, Lars. Especially if you keep pulling fancy stuff like that.”

  “I consider myself duly warned, sir.”

  Oragga adjusted his monocle. “As for your access to the mine with the coordinates I provided?”

  “Yeah…” I scratched my jawline for a moment. “That’s going to be trickier than we thought.”

  “How so? Are you unable to access it?”

  “No, I believe we’ve bought ourselves enough of a window to get the equipment down there and get a full scan—though it is significantly deeper than we suspected.”

  “Then what’s the tricky part?”

  “Sir,” said Rachel, “Oppenheimer is using slaves as miners.”

  The billionaire furrowed his brow. “That is not entirely unexpected, especially for an illegal operation such as this.”

  “Right…” I said. “However—”

  “A large number of them are children, Min,” Rachel said.

  Oragga’s eyes widened ever so slightly. His genuine look of concern further convinced me that the man was not blinded by his bajillions. He had a heart. “Well, that certainly changes things a little, doesn’t it.”

  “I believe so, sir,” I replied. I looked to Rachel. “We still have hopes of discovering whether or not there are artifacts in this mine, and we will do our very best to recover them, as per our agreement. However…”

  “We’ve got to rescue those slaves,” Rachel said, voicing the objective for the first time.

  I let the words hang in the air for a moment as we all seemed to consider the implications. This changed the plan, turning an already complicated search and recovery mission into a full-blown rescue operation.

  “Min, if I may be so bold,” I said. “Is there any way you could send in a second team to rescue these people while we focus on the artifacts? I feel we are under e
quipped for such a task. Needless to say, the Horizon is only equipped to handle another fifteen or twenty people, max.”

  “I am quite aware of the Distant Horizon’s capabilities, Mr. Reed. What concerns me more is both the timelines of this news as well as your proximity to the situation. For one, even if I could reassign a cohort of my security detail to assist you, doing so would likely initiate a full-out orbital conflict. This would not only jeopardize your presence there and set back the recovery of any artifacts in the mine—possibly by several years—but it would place the lives of too many people at risk, including the very people you wish me to save.

  “If that were not enough, said conflict would no doubt draw the suspicions of both the Union and the syndicates, and that is not hot water that I care to dip my toes in. This is not the time nor the place to explain to you the manifold enterprises which would be undermined, many of which are serving and protecting countless more lives than the ones you currently seek to liberate. Granted, there is no price I could put on a single human life. However, in a universe of gray, I am forced to play cards against the dealer of the greater good.”

  “So, what you’re saying is that we’re the closest, quietest, and therefore best hope these miners have,” I concluded.

  “That is precisely what I’m saying, Mr. Reed. Yes.”

  I mulled over everything Oragga had said. I saw the logic in it, of course. It just felt so frustrating knowing I was talking to one of the most influential men in the quadrant and the best he could do was… well… us.

  “I have high hopes for you, Mr. Reed. Miss Fontaine.”

  “Thank you, Min,” Rachel said.

  “I believe I chose you well,” he continued. “Or, perhaps the cosmos chose you, I simply employed you.”

  Just great. Here we are, about to take on an impossible task, and our benefactor is going full-tilt mystic on us.

  “Mr. Reed? Do you have something to say?” Oragga asked.

  I shook my head, snapping out of my inner-monologue. “No, sir. I just think we need to start working on a plan.”

  “Agreed. And don’t forget the freighter pilot you recently acquired back on Altan Four. Victor, was it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Victor Pelmatier.”

  “While my people don’t necessarily agree with his—how shall I put this? Workplace state of mind—they do insist his track record as an outstanding pilot and clever navigator speak for themselves. Additionally, the man has his own vessel, which is a combination that’s getting harder and harder to come by these days. You did well in securing his services. Use them. In a scenario like the one you’re about to encounter, I suspect they will come in handy.”

  “Agreed,” I replied.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it then,” Oragga said, leaning back in his chair. “If anything comes up, or you think there’s something I can do from here that doesn’t incite a system-wide conflict, let me know.”

  “We will, sir,” Rachel said. “Thank you.”

  “Thanks, Min,” I added.

  Oragga closed the connection and the holo feed went black.

  “So we’re on our own for this,” I said, turning to Rachel.

  She nodded. “Seems so.”

  “Any bright ideas?”

  “Not yet, but I’m working on something…”

  We convened in the Horizon’s operations room again. I held a fresh mug of coffee while Rachel sipped from a thermos of water. I probably should have been drinking water too, but I was too restless. We had a job to do, and that required coffee—which is technically water, right?

  Once again, Rachel had several digital documents strewn across the high-end planning table’s screen. She moved them around, formulating something in that mind of hers—that beautiful, strange, and slightly maniacal brain. The woman was a mystery. And the more I watched her work, the more I wanted to know about her past, one that both Lars and Oragga were keeping from me. It seemed I’d have to get the goods directly from the source… but that might be a long time coming.

  “First off,” Rachel said, “we’re going to need to run those scans.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “We can’t plan around what we can’t see.”

  “Right. And the more we have the better. If there turn out to be no artifacts, then that makes our lives a lot easier.”

  “And if there are…” I said, leaving room for her to complete the sentence.

  “Then we have to make a plan that allows us to grab them.”

  I nodded. “So what do you have in mind?”

  “Lars?”

  “Yes, Miss Fontaine,” the AI said over the conference room’s loudspeakers.

  “Is there any way you can hack into the building’s security system?”

  “I completed that task over an hour ago.”

  “What the hells, buddy?” I asked. “I thought you said you were going to tell us when you got in.”

  “I did say that, and I did attempt to tell you. However, our comms connection disintegrated as you went into the mine with Mr. Oppenheimer, so there was no way to tell you.”

  “Putz,” I said.

  “Is that a slanderous term, sir?”

  “Figure it out.”

  “I am placing it in my task manager, sir.”

  Rachel smiled and then tucked some hair behind her ear. “Anyway, Lars,” she said, “if you have access to building schematics and mine maps, that would help us tremendously.”

  “Certainly, Miss Fontaine. It’s my pleasure to serve you.” In an instant, several new folders appeared on Rachel’s tabletop. She seemed energized by the new documents, whereas I always found paperwork revolting. I never understood how the analysts were so content to sit behind their desks and wade through oceans of numbers, salivating over them like they were trails of candy leading to some mountain made of even bigger candies. By the way the woman started poring over Lars’s files, Rachel was both candy chaser and cutthroat assassin—a unique combination.

  “Here,” she said, swiping a map of the mines up on the main holo display. “Right here.” She pointed at a large cavity about one kilometer before the mountain peak. “According to the metadata, this is where the miners are being held.”

  “Tang City’s main enclave,” I suggested, using Ozzie’s title for it.

  “Right.”

  “I also agree with that assessment, Miss Fontaine,” said Lars.

  “Now,” Rachel continued, seemingly oblivious to anything else in the room, “if I lay the building schematics atop the mine map, merge the layers, and then re-render for three-dimensional support, while accounting for ocular distortion, that should give us… There!”

  Her sudden outburst actually startled me a little. I watched as she swiped a new file to the holo display. It rotated slowly, displayed in full color, and showed a complete representation of the facilities, the mines, and every place where the two intersected.

  “You just did that?” I asked.

  She nodded proudly. “Uh-huh.”

  “Exceptional work, Miss Fontaine,” Lars said.

  “Thanks, Lars. Coming from you, that means more than most.”

  “Were I to feel, I estimate the emotion would be akin to feeling deeply touched accompanied by a mild dose of warmth in my posterior cheeks.”

  “Your what?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. Butt cheeks is what I believe the correct colloquial term is.”

  “I’m pretty sure you want facial cheeks, pal. Humans don’t get flushed in their asses.”

  Rachel covered her mouth in a futile attempt to keep from laughing. It gave me a good laugh too.

  “Ah, very good, sir. I do see my misappropriation of the two terms. I have made a note of it for future reference.”

  “And aren’t we glad for that,” I said, sensing the poor AI may never live this one down.

  “Anyway…” Rachel said in an attempt to compose herself. “It looks like this is the main elevator shaft we took down to the command room with Ozzie.” She
pointed to a tube that connected to a room a dozen stories below the man’s office and then descended deep underground, terminating outside a small chamber about halfway between the surface and the slave’s enclave.

  “So the slaves are another half klick deeper than where we were,” I said.

  “That’s correct,” Rachel said.

  “Deep enough that our comms went out, which is one problem we’ve got to address right away.”

  “One with an easy solution,” Lars interjected.

  “Let’s hear it, buddy.”

  “Miss Fontaine, I assume you are going to want to set up at least three SPDG scanners in order to optimize penetration and maximize triangulation.”

  “Three who-biddy-whats-its?” I asked, holding up both hands for everyone to stop. “And what’s this about maximum penetration and—”

  “Optimal penetration and maximum triangulation,” Lars corrected.

  “You can’t change him, Lars,” Rachel said. “He’s a man. Some things are just stuck the way they are forever.”

  “Hey…”

  But Rachel forged ahead with a smile. “SPDG stands for super probe deep ground scanners. They’re used to map subterranean—”

  “Wait, wait… Super probe?” I asked.

  “Annnd… here we go.”

  “Lars, you’ve been holding out on me, pal!”

  “Holding out on you, sir?”

  “I always knew you had a super probe!”

  There was a moment’s silence. “Sir, I do not understand your line of implied inquiry.”

  Rachel lost it, laughing into her forearm as she wiped away a tear. “Gods, Flint. Give the AI a break, would you?”

  “Oh, come on, Rachel,” I said, now unable to keep a straight face. “You’re telling me you’re not excited to see his super probes? The guy’s got three of them, apparently!”

  Rachel was laughing so hard she had to sit down in one of the conference room chairs.

  “I regret to inform both of you that I am entirely unable to follow your dialogue. There may be a problem with my sensor equipment, or perhaps my system integration architecture requires defragmentation to—”