We're Not Your Friends

Vedma Oleiro had a ship, a crew, a new recruit and a debt of eighteen thousand credits. Of the four, only the debt ever rang her up.

VEDMA OLEIRO. Foreman and pilot of the Tozuda. Thirty-nine. Born in the outer ring of La Cicatriz, in an escape module her mother turned into a house. She collects the recruits the Leva wakes and puts them to work until they’ve paid what they owe. What you need to know: she tells everyone “we’re not your friends”, and she says it so she never has to say goodbye.

CHEMO ARDAL. Labourer. Fifty-six. Has a theory for everything and a tin of food for every theory. What you need to know: before he worked for Vedma he worked for worse people, and he knows exactly how much worse.

TAIS RENNE. Labourer. Twenty-two. Best shot in the crew and, according to Chemo, in the outer ring. What you need to know: she aims very well. Shooting is another matter.

THE TOZUDA. Tortuga. One of the oldest ships in the system. Twenty years of patches according to her pilot, sixty-two according to the recruit. What you need to know: she always starts at the second try and always lands at the first.

---

“It’s him,” the recruit said again from the cockpit door.

“I heard you.” Vedma didn’t take her eyes off the canopy. “Sit down.”

“He’s my section’s core. He was with me in the room. They stole him yesterday and now they’re selling him on the radio like a fridge.”

“Then someone will buy him. Sit down, Nueve.”

The recruit didn’t sit. She stayed gripping the frame, pale from the thaw, in a transit suit that hung off her, eyes fixed on the radio panel as if the crate were about to come out of the speaker. Vedma had picked up a hundred-odd recruits in twenty years and could tell the criers from the vomiters from the ones who asked what the pay was. This one did none of the three. This one stared at the radio.

Then the call alert went, and Vedma knew who it was before she looked.

“Darling,” said the voice of the Tejedora, Sable Vunn, from El Fondeadero, with the usual delay. “I’ve got a crate for you.”

---

Sable Vunn ran the Tablón de Trueque, the barter board, at El Fondeadero, the Nadir station, and knew the price of everything that moved in it and of nearly everything that moved outside it. She also kept the Tozuda’s papers in a drawer. Neither Chemo nor Tais knew that.

“A crate you’ll pick up in the Cementerio,” Vunn went on, “at the broken freighter where everyone meets, at the usual time. It’s paid for. The handover’s being done by a gentleman who doesn’t trust my boys, because my boys have somewhere to fall back on. He trusts yours.”

“What’s in it?”

“What do you think?”

Vedma glanced sideways at the recruit. The recruit was looking at her.

“How much?”

“I’ll write off half. Nine thousand.”

“Twelve.”

“Ten, and I won’t ask why you’ve got a passenger listening in.”

Vedma cut the mic, counted to three and opened it again.

“Ten,” she said.

“Always a pleasure, darling.”

The line went dead. Chemo, in the back seat, scraped his tin with the spoon and said what all three were thinking.

“That’s the crate off the radio.”

“That’s money.”

“That’s the crate off the radio, which the people upstairs are looking for, and we’re going to collect it with a mummy.”

“I’m not a mummy,” said the recruit.

“You’ve slept forty-seven years, love. That’s a mummy without the luck.”

---

Vedma did what she always did when fuel had to be spent: she found a way to spend it once. The recruit had to do her first job to start paying off the thaw. There were wrecks in the Cementerio with good plating to dig. And the crate was in the Cementerio.

“Two jobs, one jump,” she announced. “Nueve digs plate, we pick up a parcel and we’re home for dinner.”

“Home where?” asked the recruit.

“La Cicatriz. Where those of us who belong to nobody live.”

“La Cicatriz is where the Aurora came down.”

“That’s why it’s called that.”

The recruit went quiet. Then, without asking, she sat down in the co-pilot’s seat, which was empty because Chemo preferred the back, where you didn’t have to touch anything.

“Back,” said Vedma.

“Your nose trim’s wrong.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re trimmed nose-heavy for a load and you’re empty. It’s been eating your fuel since we left the Custodia. Look at the needle on the left. The one nobody looks at.”

Vedma looked at the needle on the left, the one nobody looked at. She hadn’t looked at it in twenty years because nobody had ever told her what it was for. It was in the red.

She touched the trim wheel two notches. The needle went back to green. The hum of the engines dropped half a tone.

Nobody said anything for a while.

“Where did you learn that?” asked Tais.

“I got my tanda licence in one of these.”

“Forty-seven years ago,” said Chemo.

“A month ago,” said the recruit. “For me, a month ago.”

---

The jump needed six more minutes of charge. Chemo filled the silence, as he always did, with a question nobody had asked him.

“Go on, then, mummy. Tell us. What was it like?”

“What?”

“All of it. The Flota. Before they kicked off. All we know down here is what the old folk in La Cicatriz tell us, and the old folk in La Cicatriz only remember the crash.”

The recruit thought about it. She looked at the canopy, where the stars were starting to crowd forward as the jump drive charged.

“Small,” she said. “Everything was small. I was born on the Aurora, in year sixteen of the crossing. There were no windows on the lower decks. The sky was a wall with numbers on it: pressure, oxygen, days to go. Kids learnt to read off the numbers on the wall.”

“And Solmera?” asked Tais. “Did you see it?”

“Nobody I knew had seen Solmera. My grandmother said the sky was blue. My mother said my grandmother lied.”

Chemo laughed with his mouth full.

“How long did it take? The trip.”

“Depends who you ask. The engine people said centuries. For us, on board, about forty years. We went in jumps, and between jumps time ran differently inside and out.” The recruit shrugged. “All I know is my grandmother left Solmera and I got here. In between there’s a wall with numbers on it.”

“No windows on the lower decks here either,” said Chemo. “And no blue sky. Ithera’s is green at midday, you’ll see. Kaldrek’s is orange. And Kharsis’s is the colour of piss. Four planets and not one with a sky like your gran’s.”

“My grandmother lied,” said the recruit.

“Exactly.”

The drive finished charging. Vedma set the route, waited for the calibration to find its target and jumped. For forty seconds the stars crowded in front of the nose, blue, and the sky behind went empty and red. Then everything went back where it belonged and the Cementerio de Aura filled the canopy.

---

Scrap. As far as the eye could see and beyond, in a tilted band that went all the way round the star: split hulls, burst containers, loose bulkheads, cables floating like weed. Here and there, inside some wreck, an emergency light was still blinking to the rhythm it had been programmed with before the war. Salvage people said you stopped seeing them after a few years. Vedma never had.

In the distance, lit edge-on, hung the big fragment, the three-hundred-metre one, with half a word painted on its flank. Three letters were left. You could read them from a long way off.

…ORA.

A salvage station was working on top of it, with floodlights and cranes, like a workshop set up on the back of a dead animal.

The recruit stopped talking. Stopped moving. Vedma saw her out of the corner of her eye with both hands flat on the panel, looking at the three letters the way you look at a familiar face in a crowd.

“That was your ship,” said Vedma.

“That was my home.” The recruit didn’t look away. “The deck-six canteen was there. They did a seaweed soup that was disgusting. My brother used to eat the lot.”

Vedma didn’t ask about the brother. In twenty years she had learnt not to ask about brothers.

---

The wreck the recruit was going to dig was a small freighter, broken in half, its hold open to vacuum. Vedma moored to it, put her helmet on, took two tools out of the locker and handed one to the recruit.

It was a ProtoGun: a grip with a trigger, a short emitter and a hopper on the back. The tool that anyone who arrives in Aurin with nothing earns a living with.

“This breaks,” said Vedma, pointing to the first mode. “The cutting beam splits rock or plate into pieces. This collects,” the second mode. “The tractor beam pulls the pieces into the hopper. Break, collect, break, collect. When the hopper’s full, give me a shout.”

“Is it yours?”

“It’s on loan. You’ll make your own when you’ve got the material. A ProtoGun is made with your hands and another ProtoGun.” She tapped the grip. “This is the other one.”

“Where do I cut?”

“Three fingers below the seam. Cut above it and you wreck the material. Cut in it and you wreck the tool. Three fingers below.”

The recruit nodded, planted herself in front of the freighter’s bulkhead, aimed three fingers below the weld and pulled the trigger. The beam bit into the plate with a clean snap. A hand-sized piece of metazinc came away and hung there. The recruit switched modes, pulled it into the hopper and turned to Vedma.

“Like that?”

“Like that,” said Vedma, who had taken three weeks to learn to do it like that.

---

They dug for an hour. Chemo kept watch from the Tozuda’s ramp. Tais lay on top of the freighter with her rifle resting on a frame and her eyes half shut, as if she were having a nap.

The drones came without a sound, because in vacuum nothing makes a sound.

There were four. Black spheres the size of a barrel, with an eye lit at the front and long jointed arms ending in cutters. They came out of the darkness of a nearby hull in tight formation and spread round the freighter like fingers.

“Sentinels,” said Chemo over the radio. “Salvage ones. Four.”

“What do they want?” asked the recruit.

“For us to leave. Or to stay for ever. They’ve never made up their minds.”

The tips of the first drone’s arms began to glow.

“Move,” said Vedma. “Sideways. Not back: sideways. Their aim turns slowly.”

The recruit moved sideways. Six beams of light cut through the place where she had been. Vedma threw herself behind a frame and the second drone scorched the shoulder of her suit.

From the top of the freighter, Tais fired once. The first drone’s eye burst. It spun twice, threw sparks and blew apart in silence in a ball of fragments.

“Thought you didn’t shoot,” Chemo shouted.

“At machines I do,” said Tais, and fired again.

The recruit had no rifle. She had a borrowed ProtoGun. When the third drone dived at her with its arms spread, she aimed at the shoulder of one arm, three fingers below the joint, and squeezed. The cutting beam sheared the arm off flush with the casing. The drone lost its balance, slewed to one side and crashed into the freighter’s hold. Through the crack in its shell, before the charge in its cutters made it burst, Vedma saw what was inside: a small sphere, about thirty-five centimetres across, with scratched plates. Then the blast.

Tais finished off the fourth. The usual silence came back.

The recruit stayed looking at the pieces of the third, drifting slowly away, turning.

“That was a core,” she said over the radio. “Inside. That was a Flota core.”

“That was a sentinel,” said Chemo.

“That was a Flota core. Like Mamparo. Like the ones the sections had.”

Vedma got up, looked at the scorched shoulder of her suit and brushed off dust that wasn’t there.

“There’s a saying in La Cicatriz,” she said. “What separates a compi from a sentinel is that someone went to fetch it. Those ones stayed out here, going round with the order they were given forty-six years ago. Nobody came.”

The recruit took her time answering.

“And who came to fetch me?”

Vedma had no answer to that and didn’t invent one.

---

They filled the hopper, went back to the Tozuda and flew to the broken freighter where everyone meets. They arrived on the exact minute. Vedma liked to arrive on the exact minute: it was the only way to get paid on the exact minute.

The meeting freighter was empty. Vedma set the Tozuda down on the shadow side, switched off the exterior lights and waited with her hands on the controls.

They waited three minutes.

Then, from behind the hull, with its nacelles lit and both turrets deployed, came a grey Revenant with one word hand-painted on its nose, Conforme, and it hung there facing the Tozuda like a big dog in front of a small one.

On the open channel came a polite voice.

“Good afternoon, crew.”

Chemo choked on his spoon.

“Oh, bollocks,” he said. “It’s El Notario.”