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⚒️ What needs to be done
by Joel Glover
Interdicted space is dangerous.
Themes and tropes from early Westerns had been resurrected by dramatists and infused through modern media. There were clear heroes and easy villains. Anyone in untamed territory was a savage, worthy of a quick death dealt by the boys in the blue coats.
Other stories were available.
You just had to be careful who heard you telling them.
There was a country, back on Earth, before the anthropocene disaster. Neighbour spied on neighbour, and everyone was surrounded by concrete and barbed wire. If you were lucky, you could slip past the guns and the dogs to a land where men were free.
Of course, back on Earth—in that land where men were free—you still had bosses who would grind you down.
Maybe, instead, the story was about even farther back. A story of a Middle Empire, with rulers chosen by heaven, and how if you had the right papers you could cross the entirety of the land with no obstruction. Most people didn’t have those papers, so they stayed where they were planted and tended the crops. And beyond the wall there were brave, free men and women.
Maybe this was a story where the worker kicked over the new machine that was stealing jobs and hope from the people. Perhaps the people would march together for the capital, or storm the prison, or resist the corvee and the press gangs.
If you lived in the Interdict you had to hope it wasn’t a story where the rebels laid down and died.
Interdicted space is dangerous, and you knew it was so because the buoys and the message relays said so.
This was not a place for Man.
Men were there anyway.
Jean-Marie strapped on his helm. It was not the most expensive thing he had ever owned, but it was certainly the most expensive thing he had ever purchased.
It was worth every centime.
A monster’s visage glared back at him, trapped in the fractured reflections of the airlock’s mirrored surfaces. There were hints of mandible, of alien jaws and teeth, bones and armour plating like nothing a sane man could imagine. The black material seemed to drink the light from the room, casting nothing back.
He sent two quick static pulses with the tongue mic, and got three back in return.
Go time.
Magnets were no use on organic hulls, and grappling wire too inconsistent. Grabbing prey on the move required a more kinetic approach. The Bras de Fer had plenty of iron within, but it used its conical nose to punch a hole straight through the walls of the target ship. Jean-Marie rocked in the straps holding him in his chair. Without the mouthguard he would have bitten through his tongue, he’d seen it happen before; Little Pierre coughing up blood when he should have been boarding. Explosive rods mounted on the Bras’ hull punched into their victim, hooking them in place like a remora onto a shark—if a remora intended to consume the shark from the inside out.
The boarding team kicked clear of their straps, forcing the hatch open and clawing their way inside.
Jean-Marie hoped the wildcat miners wouldn’t resist.
This was all for their own good.
He hoped they understood that.
There were three ships in their school; Bras de Fer, Dieu-le-veut and Hippolyte. All three had the same predatory shape: conical noses twisted like drill bits, long sleek bodies, armaments bristling along their rigid spines. Between them they could put a boarding party of twenty into their target, not enough to subdue a large crew unless you were ruthlessly violent and terrifyingly imposing.
Jean-Marie hoped the armour and the weaponry festooned about him would allow the latter to precede the former.
He had been disappointed before.
“Comrades, this is the Freedom Caucus speaking. We are here to collect donatives for the cause. We apologise for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience.”
Hillary had been chosen to give the message. Her voice was soothing, her California accent the familiar sound of old imperial power even as the Caucus mounted a resistance against the new shapes and forms.
“Fuck off.” The woman’s voice came back to them through the emergency comms, punching through the drone and wail of alarms.
Apparently he would need to show them the armour and weapons at closer range if he wanted to be intimidating.
He and Hervé raced through the open spaces in the ship, hunting for the resistance which would be clotting somewhere within the vessel. A sufficiently large obstruction could kill.
His suit scattered ultrasonic pulses through the halls, unsettling noises, eerie and unpleasant. Some were sounds captured from ships overrun by carnivorous renegades, others artificial inorganics designed to overwhelm the senses.
One of the miners aboard cowered in the corner, thoroughly petrified.
Another started to brandish a tool of some kind, only for Hervé to put him down with a beanbag round straight to the skull.
Hervé claimed you couldn’t recruit dead men to the cause, but Jean-Marie doubted that anyone whose nose had been flattened by one of Hervé’s custom night-night rounds was going to be particularly amenable to Caucus propagandising.
The woman who came round the bend with a gun drawn and a boarding shield up was clearly in no mood to screw around. Or submit.
“I said ‘fuck off’!”
The beanbag round Hervé fired spun off the shield she raised with a merry little thump. Jean-Marie ratcheted up the volume from his emitters and stood.
“Ooooh, very scary,” she taunted.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he told her. He raised his gun—a real gun—and pointed it at her. “But you’re pissing me off.”
He pulled the trigger and sprayed the floor around her booted feet with copper shards. She screamed and curled up around the bleeding mess he made of her feet.
“Normally people get a warning,” Hervé told him.
“This helmet is warning enough.”
He didn’t like hurting people.
But he would do what needed to be done.
The ship’s refinery was loaded with thulium, yttrium, and mimirtrium. The abundance that the miners had found justified their decision to delve Interdicted space.
Sadly for them it also justified a more piratical interest in their work.
“They’ve struck magnesium too,” Hervé reported. “A big node. We should report this back.”
From the floor a miner stared up angrily at Hervé, probably thinking about all the hard work it had taken to find the minerals, all the risks they had taken. Hervé patted his shotgun butt nonchalantly, not even turning from his hunched review of the data terminal.
You board enough ships, you get a feel for when people might be taking umbrage.
“Almost all sealed up here,” reported Thatcher, from across the intercom.
Cavendish kept a very close grip on their Growth Matrix technology. Every aspect, from the polymer blocks that fed the printers, to the proprietary shapes and CAD which guided the nozzles, to the printer heads squeezed through monopolistic supply chains, which added margin on margin in sedimentary layers until a wildcat mining crew could barely afford to patch a leak in their hull without mortgaging their work for a year.
That was why it was important—if you were running a revolution—to steal them wherever you could.
“Ok, withdraw when ready,” instructed Jean-Marie.
The crew were not to know that the repair crew had already returned to their ship, and that Thatcher’s report was the all clear.
There had been incidents where ships crews had tried to seize back control of their vessels before the Caucus were clear. It was why stealing from men making an honest living was so hard. This ship was full of people who cared for each other, whose lives and livelihoods depended on their community. Good, honest folk.
Like the Caucus, if only they’d see it.
Crews who were working for the Company or their parasitic hangers-on knew nobody would thank them for putting their lives on the line. Those with less benevolent employers had been known to defect wholesale when offered the opportunity.
Across the bridge Thibaut made his final adjustments. Cutting the power in a large ship was not a difficult job. You took a pair of nylon sheathed wire-cutters and sliced through a few crucial cables. It only took a few minutes to repair, but that few minutes would be more than enough for the five remaining comrades to get clear.
“The Caucus thanks you for your contribution,” Jean-Marie told them.
“Not like we had a fucking choice,” the pilot complained—not too loudly—through the lips Hervé had split open with his shotgun butt.
“Nevertheless.”
Thibaut plunged the cabin into darkness.
It was time to be elsewhere.
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