The Slums of the Solar System Books 1-3

Chapter 3

Chapter Three

Takashi

Tak didn’t think you could properly call what he had arrived on a ship. Someone had built it piece by piece from whatever bits of junk would serve for the sole purpose of pushing cargo containers from space station to space station, but only those near Earth and the moon. He was quite certain that when the pilot and copilot were going through their preflight checklist, the thing they called the “life support system” was made of repurposed coffeemakers. The fact that the three of them had made it to Barnacle Town still breathing was a minor miracle.

It had made him terribly homesick.

But now he was back inside a corporate space station, although not one entirely taken over by riffraff like Haven was. This one was all corporate on the inside but a layer of riffraff clung to the outside. The ships docked at the center of the hub, and his destination was the farthest point from where he now floated, one hand clinging to a cargo net bulging with weird objects. The pilot had shoved him and his duffel bag out of the ship and then promptly disappeared. Tak looked around for some clue as to where he was meant to go. There was a lot of cargo secured against the walls but very few people.

Then he saw one, an angry one coming his way, pulling himself from cargo net to cargo net with great efficiency.

“What are you doing here, boy?” If the man was put off by discovering that Tak was both a foot taller and a foot wider than he, he didn’t show it.

“Tak O’Reilly,” Tak said, putting out a hand, which the man scowled at but didn’t deign to touch.

“You’re not getting into Barnacle Town. I don’t know what your pilot promised you, but the town is closed. We can’t fit another shiftless drifter inside our hulls.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Tak said with a smile. “Where can I catch a ride out of here?”

“I don’t arrange rides,” the man growled and kicked away, propelling himself back down the long cylinder of the cargo bay. Tak’s smile grew wider still, and in his mind he began composing the letter to his mother, explaining why even the effort she’d gone through to put him on a nonstop flight hadn’t been enough to get him all the way to her father’s beloved sumo school. The fact that the blame couldn’t possibly be his was an added bonus. She couldn’t say he hadn’t tried.

Tak secured his duffel bag on his back and began poking around the cargo bay, completely at home in the null gravity. Most of the ships were slapdash affairs like the one he had come in on, not built for more than moving from space station to space station. You could probably crash one on the surface of the moon and walk away from it, but you’d never get it back up into space again. Which was a shame; Tak was rather partial to the lunar cities. They were horribly overcrowded, of course, and every trip he had made there had involved at least one series of painful inoculations against whatever latest epidemic was sweeping through the population, but there was a music scene there, and he loved live music.

Further down the bay he saw a ship with a logo he recognized. It was from one of the floating cities of Venus, a mining colony. It didn’t look luxurious enough to be from one of the pleasure cities. That might be a good option, Tak thought. He could find a job on the ship to take him to the mining colony, then find a job there. And maybe, someday, crash a party in one of the pleasure cities.

It wasn’t likely, but a boy could dream.

“Hey, kid!” This from a guy scarcely older than himself, although they were nearly of a size. “You doin’ anything? Wanna give us a hand?” He was towing a crate out of a decent-looking ship, one that looked sturdy enough to handle atmo and massive enough to go down a gravity well and get back out again. Maybe it was Earth-bound.

“Sure,” Tak said, launching himself into the ship’s cargo hold and releasing the mechanism on the next crate to let it float free after him. “Where are we going with them?”

“You’ve done this before,” the other kid said, impressed.

“Since before I could walk,” Tak said, which was very nearly true. “I can fly ships and fix them, too.”

“You sound like you’re angling for a job. We’re locking down these crates over here.” He pointed and Tak followed. “The name’s Owen,” the kid said, locking down his crate on the platform before extending his hand.

“Tak.” He never gave his full first name; the shorter version involved less explaining. Half of his blood was Japanese, but none of it showed. “Maybe I am looking for a job. Where are you headed?”

“Back to Mars. Ever been?”

“Yeah, once or twice.” He didn’t add that he hated it there. The deserts were gorgeous, no question about it, but the fascist rules the people of the domed cities lived under held no appeal for him. It was going to be hard enough in six months’ time when his mother expected him to join her there. Of course he could stay working on the ship, always on the move. That life had suited him fine once before.

Tak and Owen unloaded a dozen more crates. Though the crates weighed nothing here in the center of the satellite, they massed quite a bit and could be awkward to work with, but the two of them both had the confident touch of experienced cargo haulers.

“Here,” Owen said, slapping a few round coins into Tak’s hand. “You still thinking about that job? I could talk to my captain.”

“Thanks,” Tak began, but he was interrupted by a long stream of what seemed to be cursing, although the English was too thickly accented for Tak to quite understand. It was the pilot who had originally brought him here, and he seemed irked.

“Come!” the man said, pulling on his arm. “Come!”

“I guess you gotta go,” Owen said.

“Guess so. See you.” With a sigh, Tak followed the pilot down the length of the cylinder, away from the ships and toward the surly man who had already told him he couldn’t stay.

“What’s all this?” the surly man asked, clearly put out at being interrupted, although to Tak’s eyes he hadn’t been doing anything much.

The pilot gave a long explanation that Tak didn’t bother to try to follow. Then he grabbed Tak’s arm again. “Give. Give the...” His hands fluttered and Tak had not a clue what word was escaping him.

“You’ve got a message of some sort?” the man said with a sigh.

“Oh.” Tak unzipped a pocket and dug out a small silvery disk hanging from a thin chain. The man took it, turning it over in his hands.

“You need a computer to read the file,” Tak offered.

“I don’t need to read the file; this mark here is good enough for me,” the man said, examining the Japanese character engraved on one side. Tak couldn’t read it, but he supposed it was the name of the man who owned the sumo school he was meant to be enrolled in.

“Good enough for what?” Tak asked with a sinking feeling.

“You should have said before that you were here for the school,” the man said. “That’s a whole different situation.”

“So I can go in?” Tak asked.

“Yeah. But keep that handy, will ya? I’m not the only one’s going to make the mistake of thinking you’re just a drifter.”

Tak nodded, zipping it back inside his pocket before following the direction of the man’s finger to an elevator.

So close.

Once out of the elevator, the Japanese character got him past a pair of corporate security guards, who quickly escorted him out of the satellite airlock into what could only be Barnacle Town.

He was certain he had been in more squalid places, although he would be hard-pressed to name one at the moment. It was not nearly so crowded as the lunar cities, but it was far more chaotic. There were no streets or buildings like in a city, nor were there hallways and rooms as in the smaller space stations like Haven. No, here was nothing but a twisted wreck of ships all welded together, with people crawling over, around, and through them, passing through every busted-out window, doorway, and hole blown through the hull by space debris. It was like a human ant farm, only instead of building in sand, they had built in space junk.

He loved it at once. He put his hand into his pocket, pulling out the disk on its chain and slipping it around his neck. There was gravity here and little risk of losing it. But his fingers had brushed against something else: the coins he had been paid for helping to unload the Martian ship.

Now Tak had a choice to make.

His mother had intentionally sent him here on a nonstop flight with no money and no possessions worth trading. She had meant to make sure he had no choice but to go at once to the school and stay there. It had cost her so much to get him in. Not in money—she had never had much of that. No, she had paid in pride. She didn’t have much of that left either, not after having to return to her father, young Tak in tow, husband gone to the far side of the solar system. His grandfather had worn her down with his constant criticisms of everything she did. Now that he was suddenly dead, her plan to leave Tak with him while she completed her probationary period at her new job was shot. So she had done what she thought was the only thing left: called up her father’s old friends and begged and groveled until Tak had his place at the sumo school.

His grandfather had once gone to this school. He had often regaled Tak with long tales of his former days, happy days spent in the sumo stable. He had had a bright career ahead of him at one point. To hear him talk, you’d have thought that point was still ahead of him, some shiny thing just beyond the horizon. He had never even noticed with what horror Tak listened to his stories. Being mentally traumatized in pursuit of a goal that could be gone in the blink of an eye—or the blowing out of a knee—was not Tak’s idea of how he wanted to spend his life. The fact that his grandfather had never gone on to do anything else afterwards, never pursued any other job, let alone dream, was something Tak considered unforgiveable.

Tak knew his mother hadn’t wanted to send him here. She didn’t like the idea of such strict discipline any more than he did. But she liked less the idea of Tak out on his own, especially in Haven. He could see her point; he had become one of the security team’s scapegoats. A few of the things they had picked him up for he had actually done: gambling and a petty theft when he was too young to know better. But now they picked him up for all sorts of crimes just because they always knew where to find him, and because it made the coalition of merchants that ran Haven happy to know their security team could always catch a culprit, even if it wasn’t the right one. Without his grandfather’s corporate ties, Tak would have spent a lot more time in custody. Now, with his grandfather gone, even Tak could see the merit in leaving Haven and starting over somewhere else.

They had no other family; there really was nowhere else for him to go. So his mother had tracked down friend after friend of her father, playing the game of favors promised and favors remembered. She had kept these conversations out of Tak’s hearing, but he saw in her eyes afterward how much they had upset her. She had known these people before, had lived in their upper-level corporate world, and had left it all to be with Tak’s father, free, and to live in a world where the give and take between people wasn’t so scrupulously accounted.

Even remembering that look in her eyes, could he force himself to go to that school, just because it was what she wanted? Now that, with those coins in his hand, he had another choice?

But was the school really what she wanted for him? Or was it just for him to be OK without her for six months?

Tak didn’t even bother inquiring as to the location of the school. And finding a game of chance in progress didn’t require asking for directions; any out-of-the-way alley would do. Soon a few lucky throws of the dice had his two coins up to twelve.

“I like this town!” Tak said, putting his money down for one last throw. He had enough for a couple meals, his usual stopping point. Getting greedy made enemies.

“Do you now, stranger?” said one of the other kids. No one huddled around the dice was any older than twelve and all were much smaller than Tak, but they had a sharp look to them. He guessed they were all concealing weapons of some fashion, and they were starting to glance at each other as if they didn’t trust his luck. When the dice came up boxcars again, there was grumbling.

“Hey, they’re your dice, you know,” Tak said, collecting his coins and disappearing them into pockets. “Is there a place I can get a room and some food?”

“No,” one of the kids said. “We don’t have space for strangers.”

“OK, no room, but some food? I’m famished,” Tak said. He wasn’t concerned about the lack of room; he had slept in streets and hallways before. He would just have to be sure to secure his money in the bag around his neck first.

“Where you from?” the kid persisted.

“All sorts of places,” Tak said.

“You gotta give us a chance to win our money back,” another kid said.

“Tell me where I can get something to eat and I will,” Tak said. “Well, I’ll eat first, but then I’ll come right back.”

“I think you’re too lucky,” the first kid said, picking up the dice and examining them.

“Don’t be a sore loser. Those were your dice.”

“Maybe you switched them,” the kid said.

“Look, you’re being ridiculous. I’m out of here.”

Tak put his coins in his pocket, zipped it shut, and headed back out into the crowded lanes. People were everywhere, climbing up and over wings and defunct engines and hulls, carrying baskets on their backs, as the climbing frequently required hands as well as feet. Tak looked back once or twice, but no one was following him.

He found a vendor selling falafels from a cart. He slipped off his duffel bag and dug out his bowl, then negotiated how many coins it would take to fill it with the spicy patties plus generous dollops of baba ghanoush and yogurt and enough pita bread to soak it all up. It was most of his money, but as Tak savored the spicy goodness, he declared it well worth it.

The LED panels strung throughout the town began to dim—some sort of community-mandated nighttime. The lanes were still full of crowds, and businesses that liked the dark were beginning to show signs of life. Tak found what he guessed served as Main Street, a mostly straight, fairly long and open stretch of space built on the back of a single rocket-shaped ship, the other ships stacked to arch over this road rather than fill it. Tak saw a few people gathering things up off of spread blankets or taking down little display stands. The marketplace, then. A good place to search for work when it opened in the morning.

Tak saw a gap in the fuselage of one of the smaller ships sitting on the back of the rocket where a panel had broken away, not too visible from the street. He climbed up to get a better look. It was tight, but scavengers had removed enough components from within to leave a space just large enough for him to curl up in. He still didn’t think anyone was following him, but caution was never a waste. In that niche he could see without being seen and, unlike a lane, there wasn’t a back side that would also have to be watched. He would still have to sleep lightly, just in case.

Once he had pulled himself up into the little cubby, he secured his coins in the bag around his neck and tucked it and the silver disk under his shirt. Then he pillowed his head on his duffel bag, gazing down along the length of the marketplace. There were a few phantom smells still lingering in the air from whatever had been for sale under his niche that morning: overripe fruit and fried bread overwhelming other, subtler smells that gave him a vague sense of machinery, solvents, and oils maybe.

Going to bed with a full belly was always the way to end a day well spent. His mother hoped for more. She had spent the last three years slaving away in the corporate part of Haven to earn qualifications as a lab tech just so she could have more. But Tak thought this a fine life. There were days without food, but they only made the falafels more satisfying when you got them.

He had just drifted off to sleep when a dozen hands emerged from the darkness, reaching in from all around him and pulling him out of his niche. He hit the rocket ship with a dull thud, landing mostly on his shoulder but his skull still impacting hard enough to leave him a bit dazed, dazed enough to still be wondering how what seemed to be an intact rocket had gotten into space, before there were other smaller thuds around him. Then it was hands and feet in the darkness, kicking and striking him all over his body. Tak curled into a ball, arms around his head and knees to his chest to protect what he could, but more than one sharp-toed shoe found his kidneys or the back of his head. He tried to get up and fight, but there were just too many of them.

Then the hands were on him all at once, turning him over and pulling his arms away so they could get at what was hanging around his neck. Tak struggled, managing to get to his knees this time, but two boys holding tight to each of his arms were more than he could handle.

“We don’t like strangers in Barnacle Town,” someone said. Tak raised his head, focusing blurrily on the kid in front of him. No, not a kid; this guy was a year or two older than Tak.

“Yeah, I got that impression.”

“The money is around his neck. I saw him put it there,” one of the other kids said.

“Is it, now?” the kid in front of him asked, stepping closer.

“I suppose you’re going to call it a tax?” Tak asked. This wasn’t his first mugging.

“I don’t need to call it anything. I’m just going to take it.” His hand closed around the bag and pulled, snapping the bag cord and disk chain both. “What’s this?” he said aloud, turning over the silver disk. “It’s you. You’re the one we’re looking for.”

“Yeah, I guessed that,” Tak said, mopping at his nose with his shirt sleeve. The only light was from some sort of drinking establishment on the opposite end of the marketplace, so it took Tak’s groggy mind a minute to work out that the slick of black on his cuff was blood from his nose.

“No, I don’t mean that. Forget that. The boys know that when you gamble sometimes you lose. Right boys?”

There was a murmur that was meant to be assent, but to Tak’s ears they sounded as confused as he was.

“Who am I again?” Tak asked.

The boy sighed loudly, then picked up the silver disk from Tak’s chest to dangle it before his eyes.

“You’re meant to be someplace today. Do you remember that?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’ve been asked to find you and make sure you get where you’re going.”

“You’re from the sumo school?”

“No. Let’s just say we’re associates.”

Tak rubbed at his nose again, then grimaced as he twisted the sleeve of his sweatshirt to find a clean spot. “Can you be more clear?” he asked at last. “I hate speaking in code. Particularly if we aren’t speaking the same code.”

“All right,” the boy said, leaning in close and putting a hand on Tak’s shoulder. “You came here to Barnacle Town for one purpose: to go to the sumo school. That is the only purpose you will be fulfilling in Barnacle Town. We will be escorting you to your school now, and if we come across you again in future, it had better be because you’ve been given permission to visit our humble town, or we will escort you back again. Also, this ‘escort’ can be a with- or without-violence experience; that’s totally up to you. Is that clear enough for you?”

“I think so,” Tak said, struggling to keep the fear out of his voice. Not fear of what the boy had said—Tak had been on the receiving end of much more explicit threats in his time—but fear of what the boy was doing with his hand on Tak’s shoulder. He didn’t seem to be pinching or squeezing anything, but Tak’s whole arm had gone numb and cold, and the feeling was spreading into his chest.

“Good,” the boy said, and that hand gave a friendly slap before falling away. Tak pulled his arm in close to him, rubbing it back to warmth. “The school is this way. I guess you got lost, huh?”

“Something like that,” Tak said. Cursing fate. Clearly there was no way he was not going to go to this school.

But that didn’t mean he had to stay.