A Deal with the Devil's Broker Read online

  Contents

  Front Matter

  1. Rookie Mistakes

  2. He Said, She Said

  3. Medical

  4. Cold Comfort

  5. Window

  6. Impact

  7. Gift

  8. Garage

  9. Privateers

  10. Excess Baggage

  11. Hell and Starlight

  12. Second Star

  Back Matter

  A Deal with the Devil’s Broker

  Copyright © 2016 by Steve Ruskin.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, or persons (living or dead), is wholly coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover design by TheCoverCollection.com

  Acknowledgments: A quick thank you to my beta readers, to Debbie at the Cover Collection, and to my editor Shelley Holloway at Holloway House. You all are amazing.

  1

  Rookie Mistakes

  “FIVE MINUTES UNTIL TRASH CHAMBER EVACUATION.”

  Overcome by the pain in her hand, Noemi Ochana leaned back against the frigid metal wall of the maintenance corridor, the cold quickly penetrating the fabric of her skintight bodysuit.

  Ow! Dammit!

  It was well below zero down on the maintenance deck of the interplanetary freighter Devil’s Broker. Noemi’s breath froze in front of her face, each puff growing wispier and more elongated as the circulation vents above drew it up and away. If not for the air scrubbers constantly removing the ambient moisture, the corridor would be coated in ice.

  She stuffed her thumb and forefinger into her mouth, and the taste of warm blood and old grease covered her tongue. It made her want to spit, but any more liquid on the floor could cause her to slip.

  Again.

  Damn this frigid, cheap-ass ship and the cheap-ass company that flies it, she swore silently, her mouth clenched around her throbbing fingers. She wondered—not for the first time—if she would have been better off back on Tiber Station instead of here, employed as a cargo lifter on the Devil’s Broker, one of the ExoRok mining company’s freighters.

  No, she decided. I’d rather bleed to death inside this tin can in the cold heart of space than be alive and warm on that dead-end station.

  Overhead, the recorded female voice continued its mechanical countdown.

  “FOUR MINUTES UNTIL TRASH CHAMBER EVACUATION.”

  She shifted away from the wall and tentatively withdrew her fingers, holding them up in the corridor’s dim light.

  “Hell and starlight!” she swore. There was a deep gash across the pad of her thumb, and another slice on her finger that tore the nail half off. Thick, dark blood welled out of the cuts the moment the fingers were out of her mouth, and she caught a distressing glimpse of exposed bone.

  “That’s gonna need to be fixed,” she muttered.

  She’d forgotten her med kit in her room, so she had no nanoclot bandages. Dumb decision—that was a protocol violation right there. No gloves, either. Double trouble—they’d penalize her for sure, increasing her already considerable debt. But she had been at a party, dammit. Who brings nanoclot bandages and techsuit gloves to a party?

  She eyed the locked hatch door across from where she squatted. Jeral—her team leader—was behind that hatch. Possibly hurt. Probably drunk. And about to be ejected into space.

  She put her fingers back in her mouth and wondered how the hell she’d gotten herself into this mess.

  ~

  She recalled her first attempt to get Jeral out of the trash chamber. It had been from the top of the trash chute up on Habitat Deck.

  That’s where all of this started. Trash Chute 2, one level up. After the party.

  That had only been about ten minutes ago, but it seemed like hours.

  God, how chute TC2 stank when she’d crawled into it. Jeral had already slipped too far down, so she’d taken off her coat and lowered it to him, hoping he could grab the sleeve and climb out. She hadn’t even thought about the consequences.

  She’d had no luck. Either he was too far down or—much worse—he was unconscious.

  When she’d pulled her coat back out, it snagged on those hinged metal teeth that lock when tugged upward, ensuring the trash only went one direction: down. She pulled and pulled, and eventually, her coat came free, but with a gigantic rip in the fabric on one side and across the sleeve.

  “Hell and starlight!”

  It took real effort to rip the fabric of a techsuit, interwoven as it was with bioengineered Kevlar-carbon nanofiber and girded with mesh thermowire. But somehow, she’d managed to do it.

  When she’d put her torn coat back on, her heart sank when it failed to activate: no power, no heat. She fingered the rip. Damn. The primary thermowire conduit had been severed.

  The coat was completely dead. The LED chronometer on the sleeve was unlit, and the heads-up display built into the opti-filament hood stayed black. Even the coat’s color was the inert pale gray that indicated it had lost its ability to colorize. Normally, her coat was bright green, the color worn by her and her fellow cargo mech pilots.

  Her techsuit’s fabric could turn other colors as well. Bright orange to help others find her if she was hurt or unconscious somewhere in the bowels of the ship. Pale blue to indicate she was off duty.

  But now the coat was just a dull, dead gray. The color of failure. She looked around the room to see if anyone had been watching. Everyone knew the importance of a working techsuit.

  Shit. That coat was her livelihood. Or half of it, anyway. Her pants and boots still worked, keeping her legs warm and displaying the lifter’s green. But without the coat, with its encircling hood and ability to regulate her upper-body temperature, she couldn’t survive long in the unheated areas of the ship.

  Not only that, but the coat’s neuromuscular interface was damaged. That was what enabled her to drive her cargo mech, transferring her subtlest movements to the machine’s giant exoskeleton as she sat inside it. Without a properly functioning techcoat, she couldn’t do her job.

  And she’d gone into serious debt for this job. If she couldn’t work off her accrued debt, that debt would be sold, and her along with it.

  Unless she saved Jeral. He could help her get a new coat.

  So, shredded coat trailing behind her, she’d plunged down the narrow access stairway to Maintenance Deck, taking the steps three at a time.

  And damn. Maintenance Deck was cold. The metallic skin of the ship’s hull pulled the deep-space chill right in. Like most freighters, only certain areas of the Devil’s Broker were heated. Habitat was, though barely. Maintenance most definitely was not. Most of the ambient heat from the engines was shed by means of giant external radiator fins designed to keep the drives cool and running efficiently. On the Broker, a small amount of that engine heat was captured and piped into Habitat, but Cargo and Maintenance Deck remained discouragingly frigid.

  That’s why techsuits were necessary for freighter work. It was easier and far less expensive to heat a small human in a suit than to heat the entire inside of a space-going freighter, with all that expensive ductwork, insulation, and climate regulation systems. It was a simple matter of economics, the corporate bottom line.

  That line was something any deep-space mining company was keenly aware of. Delivering cargo quickly mattered. Human comfort did not. The Devil’s Broker wasn’t a New Carthage pleasure yacht, after all.

  When she had arrived on Maintenance Deck, she’d hoped she would quickly find the trash chamber he’d fallen into. But Mai
ntenance was confounding—its maze of tight access corridors looked nothing like the orderly hallways of Habitat above. She had searched frantically until she finally found the hatch corresponding to the chute Jeral had fallen into.

  “TC2!”

  She’d grabbed the hatch door’s lock wheel. Stuck. Naturally.

  She’d tugged.

  Pulled.

  Kicked.

  Nothing.

  Cold as it was, she’d dropped her damaged coat on the floor to mark the location. Having found the right hatch, she didn’t want to run past it in her haste when she returned. Then she ran off to find something to loosen the lock. Grease, oil … anything.

  It hadn’t occurred to her that cold fingers and industrial-strength lubricant would be a bad combination.

  ~

  “THREE MINUTES UNTIL TRASH CHAMBER EVACUATION.”

  She now sat forlorn, the blood from her injured fingers dripping down her forearm, streaking the sleeve of her bodysuit—black lines in the red light of the corridor, thick like the grease she’d spilled all over the floor.

  Damn the cheap-ass grease on this cheap-ass ship!

  She was shivering now, looking at her dead coat that lay across the corridor from her, just beside the hatch. Frayed ends of thermowire mesh were visible in the torn edges of the fabric.

  Time was of the essence. If she couldn’t get Jeral out of the trash chamber before it was evacuated, he would die. And although he could be a real prick, he was still a human being. And she was pretty sure that his death would be some violation or other that would increase her corporate debt, probably even more than the damage to her coat.

  Probably.

  The system of values on the Devil’s Broker was, frankly, immoral. The cargo and other company property ranked near the top. Human life, as far as Noemi could tell, ranked somewhere near the bottom. Especially for a rookie like her.

  But she had to start somewhere.

  With a lot of hustle, and a few trips between the outer and inner planetary zones, a rookie like her could become a bonafide lifter, third class. Then she’d have a small salary. She could pay off her initial debts, like her techsuit, and build up her credit account.

  Eventually, she would climb the ranks: lifter, second class. Then, in time, first. That meant bonuses. Corporate profit-sharing. Opportunities to get onto better ships.

  With even more time and hard work, some politicking, and a little luck, she could make her way inward, toward the center of the Aquitania System: the inner planets, maybe the ring stations orbiting New Carthage, and one day onto the surface of New Carthage itself, with its mountainous, island continents and vast, sparkling oceans.

  Where life, she’d been told, was good.

  Really good.

  “TWO MINUTES UNTIL TRASH CHAMBER EVACUATION.”

  Noemi got to her knees, fingers back in her mouth. The empty grease jar lay next to her coat—it had rolled sideways and stopped there after she’d dropped it, its last thick drops trickling out to join the pool that had formed when she’d spilled it, reminding her of her second failed attempt to rescue her boss.

  ~

  Minutes earlier, when she had tried to twist the jar open, its crusted lid had come off too quickly. She’d bobbled it, almost caught it, then watched in horror as it got away, its viscous contents spattering over the walls and floor.

  At least she’d had the foresight to grab a large wrench from the supply closet where she’d found the grease. That wrench had been her last chance. So she wedged it into the hatch door’s lock wheel, realizing for the first time how the biting cold had numbed her exposed hands.

  She was strong. But the torque from her tugging and the spilled grease on the floor had worked against her. She yanked on the wrench, slipped on the grease, and fell hard. Flailing wildly, she reached for anything that might slow her fall. What she’d caught was something sharp, a corroded bolt. Despite the numbing cold, she’d felt the skin of her fingers split open.

  Cold, bleeding, and covered in grease, in the bowels of the Devil’s Broker, she’d cried out in frustration, unable to open the hatch door that trapped her boss who was about to be blown into the void along with a load of space trash.

  God, I hate this ship.

  ~

  “ONE MINUTE UNTIL TRASH CHAMBER EVACUATION.”

  The announcement brought Noemi out of her funk, and she remembered something. She crawled across the floor and reached into the pocket of her crumpled coat with her good hand. Yes! It was still there—she hadn’t left everything in her room.

  She pulled out the utility blade and sawed a strip from her coat’s tattered lining, wrapping it carefully around her fingers. That would stop the bleeding.

  Now, her coat was definitely beyond repair. Hopefully, they’d give her a new one. Surely saving your lift team leader’s life qualified as extenuating circumstances, right? And Jeral would vouch for her, wouldn’t he? Of course he would, even though he was a self-centered jerk. At least he’d be an alive jerk if she got him out in time.

  And yet, as she stood before the hatch, Noemi recalled what she was told a few weeks ago when she received her techsuit as a new hire on the Broker: “This techsuit is expensive. Your first few runs pay for it. One techsuit. No salary until it’s paid off. And no exceptions. Understood? Confirm by saying ‘yes’ while looking into the camera.”

  That had been Mayve, the Broker’s shipboard corporate officer, or SCO. She was ExoRok’s on-ship representative, authorized to make all decisions pertaining to company business. She was apparently pretty high up the corporate ladder—a VP or something—so what she was doing here as acting SCO of the Broker was anyone’s guess.

  In fact, SCO Mayve dar Bueil had as much power and authority over the crew as the ship’s captain, Ambrose Hunt, a sour ex-military man that Noemi had only even seen once. In certain respects, Hunt was little more than a glorified corporate pilot. Most decisions that didn’t directly affect the flying of the ship were Mayve’s to make on behalf of ExoRok.

  So, unless the ship was under attack, Mayve pretty much ran the show.

  Noemi had looked into the camera and said yes.

  “No exceptions!” Mayve had repeated, in case Noemi hadn’t heard the first time. Noemi signed for the techsuit by pressing her thumbprint on the scanpad, and just like that, she was indentured once more.

  But like everyone living in the outer zone of the Aquitania System, debt was just another part of life. And as far as Noemi was concerned, debt on a ship was better than debt on a station. At least on a ship, you were going somewhere.

  Noemi was happy to have the job, even if it was on the Broker.

  At least that’s what she kept telling herself.

  Now, staring at the hatch with renewed resolve, she spread her ragged coat over the puddle of grease, hoping the fabric’s rough surface and frayed wires would do something to counter the slickness. She stepped on it carefully.

  It didn’t slide. Much.

  It would have to do.

  “FORTY-FIVE SECONDS UNTIL TRASH CHAMBER EVACUATION.”

  Through the narrow, grimy window of the hatch, Noemi suddenly glimpsed two eyes, wide with fear and panic, staring back at her.

  Jeral.

  At least he was alive.

  “Hang on!” she mouthed, knowing that even if she yelled at the top of her lungs, he couldn’t hear her through the thick metal door.

  She looked down at the corroded lock wheel. It had been seriously neglected. Who knew when it was last lubed? Someone clearly hadn’t done their job.

  She picked up the wrench off the floor. Grease covered it now. She knelt quickly and wiped it on the coat.

  Then, with one foot on her coat and the other wedged against a strut, she slid the wrench between two spokes of the lock wheel, carefully avoiding the rusted bolt on which she had sliced her fingers.

  “THIRTY SECONDS UNTIL TRASH CHAMBER EVACUATION.”

  Leaning in, she pushed with all she had. The wrench pres
sed painfully into her shoulder, but refused to budge. Her forearms ached. She felt the blood pulsing out of the cuts beneath the bandage.

  Nothing.

  She strained. Grunted. Screamed.

  It gave … just a little.

  A creak. A groan.

  It was turning now.

  A drawn-out squeal. The smell of dust and old metal.

  “FIFTEEN SECONDS UNTIL TRASH CHAMBER EVACUATION.”

  With the last of her strength, she pushed with all she had, finally turning the screeching lock wheel until the hatch door swung open.

  “HATCH TC2 OPENED. TRASH CHAMBER EVACUATION TERMINATED.”

  2

  He Said, She Said

  Jeral dar Bueil stumbled out of the trash chamber, his face a mask of panic. As he staggered forward, his feet kicked a pile of foul-smelling garbage into the corridor with him.

  “Hell and starlight, Noemi! What took you so damn long? I thought I was a goner.”

  She almost replied with a sarcastic “you’re welcome,” when he fell to the floor. A moment later, he retched, his sticky bile mixing with the puddle of grease and splashing onto her coat. Instead, she said, “Yuck.”

  Yeah, her coat was definitely finished. Ripped nearly in half. Covered in grease, blood, and now vomit. She’d have to beg for a new one for sure. Right after she visited Medical to get her hand patched up.

  She waited until he stopped heaving. He was her supervisor, but she still felt like she ought to say something.

  “Next time there’s a party, maybe you shouldn’t drink so much. Especially just before our shift.”

  He ignored her, changing the subject. “Where’d all this grease come from?”

  Now she wanted to change the subject. “Maybe we should get you cleaned up. We’re just a few hours from Cassius Station, and we’ve still got the final delivery to stack.”

  The Devil’s Broker was a mining freighter owned by ExoRok Astro Mining, Inc., itself a subsidiary of some holding company owned by Truum Aedar, a trillionaire on New Carthage and one of the planet’s many corporate princes. Like all of New Carthage’s wealthy oligarchs, he had charter from the System Council—of which he was of course a member—to exploit the riches of the Aquitania System’s dense asteroid belts, rocky outer planets, and the icy, mineral-rich moons of its gas giants.