Transference (First in the Fleet Quintet)

By Susannah J. Bell

* A mindwalker is in hiding on the edge of the Sigma Sector, where the Fleet are still a rumour.*

Flesh body. Forty. File clerk. Space station. Planet Nigel. Sigma Sector: every morning Victor Gomenzi has to remind himself who he is, where he is – and what he is.

Victor Gomenzi is a mindwalker.

On the run from Sigma agents, Gomenzi is hiding out on Nigel, tenth rate industrial colony world culturally disconnected from the Sigma Sector. He works on Nigel’s space station as an official spy for the government, extracting data for the vice president using the standard procedure. He tries not to mindwalk too much, but it’s hard to resist.

On twelve Sigma planets laws have been passed against mindwalking – yet mindwalkers are a myth, like vampires. Meanwhile, in the Church of SPIT, priests study the doctrines given to them by the Fleet. No one has met the Fleet. No one knows who they are. Except Gomenzi.

Always on the prowl, he destroys the lives of everyone around him: ex-wife and brilliant scientist Aster; shy and virginal girlfriend Tess; snack-munching workmate Tidman; insanely ambitious boss Admiral Grote. And countless others on the space station whose minds he rips apart in order to experience an emotion. Any emotion will do. He wants nothing more than to go home to Dirtball – Earth. But his twin brother Vincent is after him and Vincent works for the Fleet.

The first novel in the Fleet Quintet, TRANSFERENCE enters the psyche of a ruthless mindwalker.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Susannah J. Bell
• Release date: Feb 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311164254

Susannah J. Bell

Susannah J. Bell is a writer of science fiction and other strange and surreal works. She mostly writes novels and the occasional novelette. Her published works include A Doorway into Ultra, the Fleet Quintet and the Exodus Sequence. She lives in London in an attic flat but really wants to live in a tree. She wanted to be an astrophysicist but would settle for an alien abduction. She writes because she doesn’t know what to read.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

On planet Nigel, an H-class mining robot doll pulled its heavy drill out the rock face and turned on its neighbour. Around them rock drills screamed. The victim, dressed in regulation brown overalls to humanise it, dropped its drill to the tunnel floor where it spun furiously. As its guts were systematically mangled, no surprise was expressed on the victim’s face. It had no face. It had no feelings. It couldn’t feel surprise. With no mind to look down and see what was being done, it offered no defence. It didn’t call for help. Its body shuddered as its circuits were fried. There was no saving it. It was a dead doll.

Inside a brightly lit, sealed booth, a mining supervisor grabbed a telephone headset and frantically fitted it over his head.

Emergency in tunnel fifty-seven! he screamed. Twenty feet away, the berserk mining doll stood and watched. It revved its drill. The drill bit was four feet long, the motor unimaginably heavy. Send down doll removal, now. Now!

The doll began to march towards him. Over the headset, the operator remained slow and patient, unmoved by the crisis. Doll removal team of twenty-four in elevator thirteen. ETA in approx two minutes in shaft thirty-two. ETA in tunnel fifty seven approx –

Seven minutes! The supervisor looked sick. His face was white in the bright booth light. His eyes popped with terror. It’s fucking coming at me with a rock drill! I haven’t got seven minutes!

When the elevator doors opened on shaft thirty-two, the silence crawled out from the black, chalky rock with an inscrutable menace. The doll removal team stepped gingerly onto the platform, breathing heavily under personal oxygen masks, swinging machine guns in broad sweeps across the tunnel entrance.

Why is it so quiet? said one. Shouldn’t the dolls be working?

Would you work if your mate had gone berserk?

Yeah, but they don’t know he’s gone berserk.

They rounded a corner to confront the berserkoid revving its drill, minute drops of blood spraying through the air to land on the clean glass facemasks of the two-dozen strong team.

Oh, shit, said one near the front, squinting at a drop of blood an inch from his eyeballs. The berserkoid approached them with blank-faced menace and dropped suddenly to its knees, then fell on its faceless face. Twenty-four machine guns smoked greenly in the poisoned air.

Quick, chop it up before it wakes up!

They hauled out their axes from belt clips with much clanking of metal and armour. The glass of the supervisor’s booth was smashed. Its bright light within flickered momentarily and buzzed. There was too much smeared blood to see the body’s remains. In tunnel fifty-seven, the dropped drill still spun crazily, but began to slow. There was a screech as the bit struck the rock wall. A hundred robot dolls stood frozen, mid-operation, as if they had all been turned off at once.

***

On the surface, it rained. It had been raining for some years, steadily, the sky a uniform grey. The mining site was unremarkable other than the fact that it was built in a mud swamp. Isolated for miles around, the cluster of clapboard offices that constituted the mining site headquarters, collapsible at short notice, could only be picked up by survey satellites if the cloud ever cleared. It didn’t. Truck tracks led to the site, or away from it, leaving ruts so deep that mountaineering gear was needed to scale them. Clapboard was perhaps not the best material with which to build in persistent rain, so the offices or, at least, the offices housing more senior personnel, were fortified with sheets of corrugated iron. The whole place looked like a dilapidated squatter camp, an image the operators were keen to encourage as it guaranteed anonymity. But it meant the surface workers worked in hell. A damp, wet, cold, miserable hell where more time was spent mending the telephone lines than actually filing progress reports.

Through the mud ran a fat man, the foreman, holding a newspaper over his head as if he thought it might keep him dry. His blustering entrance into his leaky office sent papers scattering. From behind a very small desk, a bleak PA sat squeezed, watching the flying papers as if they had not been worked on for hours and were not at all in any way important. But the papers didn’t scatter far. And none escaped out the door. The foreman pulled it shut, three times before it would catch, and caught the PA’s report under his boot. He tossed it muddied onto his desk. Since the PA’s desk was crammed up behind the door, he didn’t have far to toss. The shared office was tiny, every surface crammed with computer consoles, every wall hung with wires, every wire wrapped in plastic to keep it dry.

Morning, said the PA.

Fucking doll body crisis, grumbled the foreman. He heaved his frantic bulk onto a very, very small chair with wheels and pulled up a battered keyboard. In this fucking weather. Can you believe it.

The PA’s dull mind looped around the foreman’s words. Could he believe the weather or could he believe the doll body crisis? He waited to see what the foreman would say next in the hope that this confusion would somehow be clarified.

Seven doll bodies dead, including one berserkoid. Two men dead. Production down by twenty-five percent. How could this have happened?

H-class mining robot dolls were designed with no mind with which to think. They did their jobs and were not paid for their labour. They had no lives. There were not alive. They were machines that didn’t know they were machines. They dug rock in shifts that lasted seventy hours. They tunnelled into airless depths, oblivious of the alleged poisonous gases, heedless of rock falls, and searched systematically for a particular precious substance deep underground, their expressly blank faces recording nothing. They worked hard and worked well. They were guaranteed never to fail. Yet two dolls had gone mad in a month.

It isn’t possible! shouted the foreman. This is bad news for the mine!

The PA listened mournfully. Rain or the sweat of desperation, the PA couldn’t tell, ran down the foreman’s face. He had begun to type a report, splaying wide his four usable fingers. The others were either crippled with arthritis or were stumps from accidents the PA preferred not to ponder upon.

I’d love to see her face when she gets this order.

The PA blinked. Who?

That bitch scientist on the other side of the planet.

Several thousand miles away on another continent, where it rained marginally less but was equally grey, Aster Gomenzi bent her sleek blond head over a microscope. She wore a regulation white lab coat over a stunning figure and her unmade face could not reduce the impact of her beauty, even with her hair scraped back into a knot on her neck and permanent scowl lines marring her forehead. Several male assistants huddled close around her while she worked, their interest in dull microscopic work enthusiastically high as they pressed closer to see. A computer in a glassed-in office several lab tops away pinged.

Uh, Mrs Gomenzi?

Leave it, she snapped.

The computer pinged again. Her senior assistant, experimenting with nose types for an H-class super model intended for housework, looked up from his lab counter, glancing at Aster’s office tucked away in a corner of the lab, then at Aster herself, still absorbed with microbots.

Hey, Aster, called Phil. That’s the emergency tone.

He heard her hiss and snarl but it was still some moments before she abandoned the microscope and marched into her office to check the message.

Thank you, Phil, muttered Phil, failing to notice every last drop of blood drain out of Aster’s face. Her lab coat was a rainbow in comparison.

Could you, Aster began. She stopped and cleared her throat. Her junior assistants babbled together at the other side of the lab. Phil was closest. Excuse me, Phil, do you think you could possibly make me a cup of tea?

Phil looked up. He dropped the nose experiment. The junior assistants bumped various heads as they craned away from the microscope.

Jeez, Aster, said Phil, swinging his feet off his desk. You look really sick.

Aster pressed a variety of keys on her computer and a print-out of the message chugged inch by very slow inch into view. She tore it loose but found her eyes unable to focus on the page. She blinked. They began to burn with sweat. Too panicked to concentrate, her mind drifted off to the unending problem with the laboratory aircon. She really must get a report to maintenance.

Aster?

She looked up. At the door, all her assistants faced her, concerned for their goddess. Phil clutched a mug of tea.

We have to produce seven mining dolls by noon the day after tomorrow.

Saying it out loud seemed to make it easier though no one else would have agreed with this.

No way, said Phil.

They must be kidding, said an assistant.

Wow, what happened? said another.

It must have been a rock fall, considered a third. Only a rock fall could destroy seven dolls all at once.

Or a doll body malfunction, said Phil. No one said anything for a moment. The significance of this was unthinkable. Was it a doll body malfunction?

She took the mug of tea from him and sipped it. He had made it strong and sweet, the way he liked it. The tannin and caffeine made her stomach churn and the sugar made her teeth curl, but it had a soothing effect. One of her assistants took his glasses off and pulled at his empty pockets in an effort to find something with which to clean them. Failing, he made do with a finger and tried to scratch off something hard from a lens. It helped with the thought processes.

Did they say which mine it was? he said, peering at the glass lens to see if it was any better.

No, said Aster. They never tell me anything.

Perhaps we can catch it on the News Channel later, said a fourth assistant.

Phil was suddenly angry. He might have been good looking if the arrogance of youth wouldn’t cling to him quite so tightly. Also, he had freckles. It can’t be anything we’ve done, he said. Our work is exemplary.

Oh, yes, thought Aster, our work is exemplary. A hundred images suddenly flashed through her mind. Her entire future passed before her and at the end of it, she was in jail. Then another hundred images flashed by, but the result was the same. She was going to be caught. She was going to end up in jail.

Isn’t it? Phil was anxious for reassurance. Aster could give him nothing. She arrayed her problems on the blackboard she carried around in her mind, first wiping off the numerical chalk figures she was so fond of playing with, and tried to arrange them by priority.

Which one of you is the factory liaison? She tried not to notice the look of hurt the liaison adopted because she couldn’t remember his name. Get on to the factory. Tell them I’m going to be there first thing tomorrow. That should give them enough time to panic and up production.

The second item on her problem list glared at her. Whenever another problem threatened to oust it, or even succeeded like the doll body crisis, then she would turn to it for comfort.

Will you gentlemen excuse me? I have to make a call.

Going to beat up someone in the government? said Phil as soon as the other assistants had drifted away, the factory liaison trying to find another headset that worked.

No, said Aster. My soon-to-be ex-husband.

She plugged in a telephone headset into a phone screen and static cleared to reveal a menu. Phil opened his mouth to ask her about Gomenzi. He had met him once. Briefly. Gomenzi was cool. He was about to comment on Gomenzi’s coolness but he caught Aster’s cold green eyes and suddenly remembered his nose project.

The phone screen looked like a small, chunky television set with push buttons arrayed below the screen. Very sophisticated phone screens had touch screen buttons but they weren’t popular. The screen got dirty quickly and had to be cleaned with special soft cloths and spirits.

Dial 0 for Nigel operator, said the on-screen menu. Dial 1 for off-world operator. Dial 2 to pay your bill. Dial 3 for all other requests.

Aster punched a number and the menu changed. You have dialled 1 for off-world operator. Dial 0 if this incorrect.

After a moment, Aster spoke into the mic of her headset. Hello, operator? I’d like to book an off-world call.

The screen started a countdown in very large numbers, in case Aster couldn’t read. There were ten minutes to wait. Aster pulled off her headset and the unfortunate lines between her eyes deepened. Then she reached for her tea and pretended to read the mining report. The day had hardly started and it was already lousy.

Admiral Grote, vice president of Planet Nigel, stood posed behind his desk. He commanded his lavish, ornate office with the indomitable spirit of a man who had only ever pretended to have gone to sea. Enormous windows looked out on gardens of perpetual drizzle. An oversized painting of the admiral, carefully lit so as not to enhance the bulldog jowls, hung behind him on the wall. In it, he was dressed in full admiral gear, the number of medals he had never received painted with fine detail. Grote was so bluff that he had even himself fooled. His skin had the leathery look of someone who had spent a lifetime on an ocean. His hair was grey like steel and cropped short. His eyes were faded from all the years of sea air, people thought. An antique liquor cabinet stood in the corner and against it was propped a chrome-plated crutch.

Facing him across the desk was the most senior mining operator, the foreman, flown across the planet in the admiral’s private jet. Confronted by the magnificent presence of Grote, his vice-presidential suite, his outsize television set, and his fantastic array of lies, the foreman drooped.

Goddamn! shouted Grote. What a security breach! Was anyone suspicious? The foreman shook his head. Did the doll removal team see anything?

Uh, no, sir, managed the foreman. They were too busy chopping up the berserkoid.

He caught himself. In his report, he had left out the details of the Doll Removal Team’s safety precautions. The mining dolls cost a fortune. The DRT’s actions in the name of security would come with a price. The foreman’s job. But the admiral wasn’t listening. He was thinking. This function cancelled all others. He could not hear. He could not see. His eyes were fixed to the wall opposite where dark red wallpaper lent more weight to the ponderous antiques belonging to a variety of previous vice presidents.

Right, he said at last. Don’t let the press near the mine. I’ll handle them. You make sure the lid stays on tight. Again he said, right, and mentally dismissed the foreman as he moved on to his next task. I want to make an off-world call. Jenna! He bellowed at the closed door. Jenna!

There was no answer. His small pale eyes landed once again on the foreman and he puffed himself up. The foreman shrank and stared woefully at the rain, wishing he could be dismissed. Wishing he was back in his tiny damp office, where he was, for what it was worth, the most senior mining official on site.

Planet Nigel, covered with dirty grey and yellow clouds, limped along in space around a mediocre G-type star. A million communication satellites flew about it in hotchpotch orbits, most of them out of order. The dead ones flashed no lights and emitted no electronic beeps. Further out, a large, cumbersome, poorly designed space station clumped along awkwardly, solar panels glinting, its central axis poking space at an odd angle. For a space station, it was enormous. It was a tribute to space science that it managed to maintain its position around Nigel. New sections had been added to it over the years to deal with ever-increasing traffic, yet despite these additions, there remained only one space port and from it freighter ships and pleasure cruises came and went. Most only stayed long enough to refuel.

Somewhere on the space station, a phone screen buzzed. The operator’s voice sounded pre-recorded. Planetary call coming through. In a cubicle office on the space station, Tidman tried very hard not to spill his coffee all over his desk. His eyes kept sliding to the paper cup, as if he thought it might topple over all by itself. His desk was a tip, covered with computer discs, coffee cups and general office debris. Three small fat grey screens sat on the desk in front of him. One showed files he had been working on, another was tuned to the News Channel with the sound low. A third showed static but it cleared as Tidman hooked up his headset.

Okay, answered Tidman, and dragged his eyes away from his coffee cup. He jumped to attention when Aster, looking both gorgeous and venomous, appeared on the screen.

Isn’t Victor in? said Aster irritably.

Tidman broke out into a sweat at once. He trembled with nerves. Frantically he tried to remember when last he had combed his hair and whether there was any evidence of lunch on his face.

Victor, said Tidman, as if he couldn’t place the name. Er, Gomenzi. Er, n-no. It’s n-not his shift. He c-comes in at eight. P-p-pm. T-tonight.

Shit, said Aster, looking away from the screen. I forgot which shift he was on. It’s still mid-morning here.

Well, you see, said Tidman, beginning to relax as he found something he could actually talk about. There’s c-currently only an hour’s difference between the station and the c-c-capital…

Tidman, with much staccato stuttering, began to explain the time difference in detail, but he scarcely heard his own voice. His vision was filled with an image of utter loveliness. Aster Gomenzi was stunning. Her hair was spun gold. Her eyes were emeralds. When she looked at him, she seemed to see right through to his soul.

Can you take a message? barked Aster, watching her on-screen phone bill escalate before her eyes. Tidman began removing desk rubbish out of view.

Or, said Tidman. You could phone again at seven your t-t-t –

Aster’s eyes ate into his heart.

Yes, he squeaked. Yes, of c-course I c-can.

While he rummaged about on his desk for a piece of paper that was relatively bare, Aster pulled off her headset.

For fuck sake, she said. Where are you, Gomenzi.

The phone screen showed static. With a pen that wrote only in bursts, Tidman managed to scribble down Aster’s name. He gazed at it. What did this goddess-like creature see in Gomenzi? What had Gomenzi ever done to deserve an angel such as this? He glanced over at the office’s second desk. It was empty and clean. It had five small fat grey screens on it, neatly stacked.

L-l-l-l-lucky Gomenzi, managed Tidman. He turned off the phone screen and it went dismally blank. Then he returned to his work, shuffling files around on the G-disc, alphabetising the names automatically while the image of the golden Aster burned in his brain.

Grote’s own office was six hundred times the size of Tidman’s. He sat at his boat-shaped desk pretending to work with pen and paper, when suddenly he turned his head to the door.

Jenna! he bellowed. After a moment, he bellowed again. Jenna!

There was no response. In a huff, he stood up and stomped over to the door, then wheeled around, remembering his crutch. He grabbed it and limped convincingly across the office.

Grote’s secretary, Jenna, had black hair ferociously bobbed and wore heavy white make-up to disguise her age. She sat typing at her desk with music jangling from big old-fashioned headphones. She looked up to see Grote bellowing at her, though she could hear nothing that came from his mouth. Calmly, she removed the headphones. Grote took a deep breath and started again.

What happened to my call to Gomenzi?

Sir, said Jenna. There is a fluctuating time difference between the World Council’s position on Nigel and the station. Gomenzi works the night shift and is not available on a secure line until he logs in.

What do you mean?

Gomenzi isn’t at work.

Then what are you doing here then? Waiting for me to tell you to go home?

Jenna pressed three keys on her keyboard, waited a very long moment, then flicked a switch. Her computer went dead. She picked up her handbag, small and black with a gold snap, and walked taking small steps in her tight black court shoes towards the door. She jumped but didn’t turn back when Grote thumped the floor with his crutch.

Gomenzi, goddamn, where are you!

CHAPTER TWO

Flesh body. Forty. File clerk. Space station. Planet Nigel. Sigma Sector.

Gomenzi. Victor Gomenzi. Crashed around midday and woke as he did every evening: long seconds of panic in the dark, trying to recall the nature of his identity.

Victor Gomenzi. The name he had been given. The one he used. A label for this life. Every other identity he had owned would be forgotten, or remembered only with a shudder, by those who had once used them. He remembered them all. They did not die when he did. They were just names. They didn’t mean anything. But still he had to make sure he woke up with the right one.

His life established, he lit a cigarette without turning on the lights and concentrated. His mind emptied slowly. The panic abated without residue, his attention fixed on the glowing tip of the cigarette. Overhead, an extractor fan in the ceiling sensed the smoke and turned on with a low hum, barely below tolerance level. A trail of smoke drifted upwards, in shredded wisps like a lost soul.

It wasn’t real panic. He couldn’t pretend that it was even a shade of fear but every day, when he clutched and clawed at the black emptiness, it was with a vestige of horror. The memories should have been familiar, so intrinsically part of self that it required no thought, no prompting, no need of recall, just self-knowledge. He lived for a few seconds each day without that self-knowledge. He told himself he was used to it. That he was used to the horror. It was the way he thought he should feel. The way someone else might feel. It was an emotion purloined. But whether it was his own or not didn’t matter. He would never become used to it. The awakening jolt served as a daily reminder of who he was and sometimes he thought he might like to forget.

He would have liked to forget every identity he had ever had. He would have liked to have started again, to not be who he was, to have the choice of being someone else. Each body he had ever owned, every memory attached to each, he would have liked to shunt aside. Often he did. Mostly it worked. But they would never really go away. They clung to him, their clarity unchanging when he looked at them, like photographs in an album. Only their force diminished. He didn’t like looking back. The only memories that counted were the ones he was still going to get. In the meantime, there was a cigarette to be enjoyed, the warmth of his body to savour, the feel of his skin under his hand, the hardness, the pleasure, the flesh that was perfection, the best he had owned for centuries.

When his cigarette was done, it was a set of remote control buttons he groped for, arranged on a panel above the bed. In the dark, he automatically found the one for the lights and pressed it, brightness set on low so as not to blind him. He got out of bed at once. He had no plans for the day. He had no plans. It was enough that he was awake.

Like all the lesser quarters on the station, his room was tiny, a box with a shower cubicle. Buried deep inside the accommodation section, the highest of the low-grade rents, the room was graced with a window frame. Dial-up pictures pretending to be realistic representations of panoramas were intended to calm and soothe. Blue skies with snow-capped mountains, fields of poppies, waves crashing against rocks: vistas that didn’t exist on Nigel. Gomenzi left his window blank. The whole room was blank. There was nothing in it except basic station furniture. Nothing in it suggested that anyone lived there. No personal effects or touches of decoration. Except a photograph of Aster beside his bed. He didn’t look at it. He hadn’t looked at it for a long time.

He hit the shower first. There wasn’t much of it but the water was hot and the trickle got him clean. His body was lean like wire. He was five eleven with no excess flesh. He was stronger than he should have been. Any physical force he exerted was unexpected. His skin was almost station grey, an ashen look all low-rank workers got after they had been off-world for too long. His hair was dark and matched the rings under his eyes. But the rings had nothing to do with sleep or the lack of it. Shadows clung to his face whether he slept well or not. His eyes were empty hollows, empty of expression, irises eerily pale and grey with a hard, dark rim. He caught his eyes in the mirror while he dried himself and in them saw death. He had been on the station too long. He was starting to look trapped, another clerk that would never get away.

Skin still damp, not an inch of it scarred or marred, he dialled up the fast food receptacle next to the door. On a touch screen that mostly didn’t work and was obscured with insane scratch marks from a previous tenant, he ordered coffee. He lit another cigarette and a paper cup arrived in the delivery hatch. He cracked the seal. The best thing about the coffee was that it wasn’t cold. From a drawer beside his bed, he took out a small bottle of pills and from it emptied one into his hand. He swallowed it with the coffee and finished his cigarette.

He dressed in black, pulling on boots and a leather jacket last. In the shower room mirror, he watched until he thought his expression had settled into one with which he could leave the room. Set on empty with nothing revealed. Not blank, because blank looked like stupidity, but closed. An expression which hid that which lay beneath. It disguised who he really was. It guaranteed anonymity. It was a hard mask to wear but he lived with it because he didn’t want to get caught. It was Gomenzi, the Gomenzi everyone thought they knew. In the mirror, he looked into eyes that were dead, like opaque glass, without light or life, and behind the mask he smiled.

He went unnoticed in the rush hour. Bodies pressed close on the elevator car platform. Those near to him were oblivious of their proximity to him, but as moments dragged into minutes, they stepped away. Space opened around him, a circle of flesh, and in it he stood, alienated from the general populace. He carried no menace and at first glance, no character. There was nothing about him that one would fear. He wasn’t noticeably foreign or weird or carrying a weapon. It was nothing obvious. He took care to catch no one’s eye because a glance was all it took. A single moment to experience those cold, cold eyes and the mask might slip. When the elevator car came, he found a seat without having to jostle for it.

The News Channel was on, a small screen suspended in a corner where no one could avoid it. A panel of earnest Nigellians discussed some political event that had occurred the previous day. Only the very bored made any note of it. Gomenzi glanced up suddenly, to see a woman in a suit standing near the door with her eyes on him. She had been studying his profile and a millisecond before he looked up, her eyes had dropped to belt level. Gomenzi caught her.

She was inflamed but whether with embarrassment or excitement, she couldn’t tell. Even when she looked away, she could feel his eyes still on her. But when she looked back, his expression was set to one of indifference. She willed him to look up but he didn’t. Her lungs squeezed with terror. She couldn’t understand it. What did she imagine he could do to her? The question inflamed her further. She felt as if he had looked into her heart and understood what lay there. The moment was wondrous, but so was the certainty that he could also rip it out. She frowned at the News Channel, pretending to listen to popular opinions about Admiral Grote’s latest cost incentive, and didn’t look at Gomenzi again.

Her interest roused none in Gomenzi. He was aware of his – sometimes devastating – effect on women but it had nothing to do with him. It was his body. It was a useful tool but he wasn’t conscious of using it. It was something he washed and dressed and fed. Sex was something he had been trying to resist. In fornication lay the foundation of all that was denied to him. He could not indulge. Restraint was part of his day. It was part of his life. He could not risk being caught. He could not risk temptation. The woman on the transport was better off not knowing him.

Consciously ignoring her, he settled back into his routine. Station shifts were twelve hours long. There wasn’t much else to do. After three nights of work, Gomenzi had just had his obligatory two nights off. He was anxious to get back. Work was the one place where a minuscule portion of his indulgence could be satisfied. It was hardly satisfying but it kept him going. The elevator car dropped rapidly, as it did every day on the same route, then took a sharp left. Gomenzi’s routine never varied. He took five corridors across three decks to get to the elevator car platform he liked. He never went near platform 15, only one corridor away. During the current station spin, the elevator car from 15 ran along the outside of the station and gave the passengers a breathtaking view of Nigel. Gomenzi did not want his breath taken. He did not want to see Nigel. Ever.

The woman, whose day would be ruined by desire, alighted at the Food Sector for a night shift breakfast. The food courts, split over various levels, overlooked Nigel. At any time of day or night, the planet could be seen, choked by its communications network and early space age debris. Cloud cover rarely shifted to reveal the continents and seas below. The food courts had been built during the station’s aesthetic phase, when tourists were encouraged to visit, particularly Nigellians who would never venture further off-world: a trip to the station was as far as they would ever go. But the local tourist industry was dead. The restaurants and bars were frequented only by station workers and foreigners, some of whom almost appreciated the view. Gomenzi never went to the Food Sector. His favourite place on the station was its port.

In an empty coffee lounge, he chose the same table he did every day, facing a glass partition where he could watch the ships below. If he was lucky, he would see one arrive. If he was luckier still, he would see one escape. His eyes would fix to it until it vanished from sight through the vast bay doors. Time on the station was marked by recognition of a returning ship. He could judge the distance they had travelled and calculate the route they must have taken. He recognised ship captains and crews. He recognised uniforms and the type of freight. He breakfasted for an hour, watching them. Clientele dropped in for a drink and sat crushed at very small tables. They didn’t stay long. Gomenzi stayed until the small white bowl-shaped ashtray had several butts in it and his coffee cup had been refilled twice. No one ever approached his table. No one joined him. Women glanced his way, eyes drawn with a fearful hunger but all Gomenzi saw were the ships. His pupils expanded to fill the cold grey circles of his eyes. The only hunger he felt was for the freedom of space.

Extinguishing his last breakfast cigarette, he bent over the ashtray, eyes looking down, his expression never changing. But his hands were tense. His teeth were clenched with a deep misery. The dark shadows about him revealed a man who had had his entire life ripped away and had been left with nothing except an emptiness that he dragged with him from place to place, always seeking escape, always seeking the next place, the next experience because each one until now had only given him this: this empty thing, this nothingness that was his soul. But it was a brief moment. It could have been imagined.

***

He opened the door of his office so quietly Tidman didn’t hear him. His fat colleague was munching a snack. Crumbs spilled down his stretchy jumper, something his mother might have knitted. While he munched, a programme ended-task on his computer. The News Channel was on. Gomenzi’s eyes flicked to the newsreader. Her hair was an odd colour under the studio lights. It was exactly eight o’clock. He tossed his key cards on his desk and Tidman jumped.

H-hi, he said, mouth full. Is that the time?

News just in, said the newsreader in a voice thrilling with seriousness. A rock fall in a diamond mine on the East Continent of Planet Nigel has killed two miners.

Tidman waved a hand at his computer, spilling more crumbs.

Sorry, he said. Nearly done. I’ve been so busy with the G-disc, it’s given me a headache. Maybe my blood sugar crashed or something. He finished his crumbly snack and licked his fingers. There’s like a billion Gershwins on Nigel. You’d think people would have better imaginations…

His computer pinged. The programme was done.

Bye, Tidman, said Gomenzi.

Tidman grabbed a pile of discs, shut down his computer, turned off the news, and wiped crumbs from his face with the free fingers he had left. Behind the computer he spotted a bright blue wrapper and lunged. Crumbs flew as he freed the snack. He shoved it in his mouth, forgetting Gomenzi, oblivious of the ice-cold gaze pinning him to the floor. He headed for the door, three steps taking thirty seconds as discs slipped from his grasp and he paused to take another bite and then another. At the door, snack in mouth, he turned. He took the snack out.

Your wife, he said and quailed suddenly as Gomenzi’s eyes locked onto his. She r-rang. She asked you to c-call her b-b-back.

Thanks, said Gomenzi.

I wrote a n-note. It’s on my d-d-d…

Tidman’s eyes landed on his desk. Perhaps it wasn’t worth following that thought through. More things had been lost on his desk than even he could imagine.

Bye, he said instead, and was gone, heaving his bulk at a remarkable rate towards the Food Sector.

Gomenzi took off his jacket and hung it in a small cupboard. In ten minutes, the extractor would remove all trace of Tidman: his lunch, his armpits, his nervousness. Gomenzi tried not to breathe too heavily until the ten minutes were up. Like every apartment room and office on the station, there was a fast food receptacle next to the door. He scrolled through the items available, as if there was any chance he might order something other than his usual coffee, then made his selection. Then he sat down at his empty desk and placed a hand on its smooth surface, slowly running his fingers across its coolness. There was absolute silence in the office. Sounds from the space station didn’t penetrate the walls. Gomenzi was sealed from all life.

His order arrived with a small crash, breaking the quiet. He picked up his coffee and a layer bun already quartered and back at his desk, turned on his computer and the News Channel. The falsified mining accident was still being televised. Ignoring it, he opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a bottle of pills, removing one. At the back of the drawer, where anyone could see it if they pulled the drawer open far enough, lay a gun. It was loaded.

Gomenzi did not file. He sat in a filing clerk’s office, shared it with another filing clerk, and pulled a filing clerk’s salary, but filing was not part of his day. The closest he got to it was filing reports to his senior. He spent his time waiting. He caught up on the news. He made calls or received them. His first appointment wasn’t until the quietest hour on the station, when those on the night shift were working, the dayshift was asleep and those psychologically bound to clocks thought how late it was and how much better it would be if they were anywhere except here, a small metal city revolving around a boring colony world.

His first appointment was always set for midnight. He did not want his clients to be caught leaving his office and since he could never tell how long the session would be, ten minutes or four hours, midnight was safest. At six, the corridors on the station got busier, early night shifts ending, those working days already up and about. He only saw one client a night and by four, he wanted them gone. Whatever the outcome of the night, by then he would be exhausted. Even wired up with rare exhilaration left him wiped and he had to sleep. With his head on his desk, arms flat, palms against the smooth surface, he would sleep for two hours. Door locked by remote, lights off, he was in a tomb. His body seemed to know he only needed two hours. There was no need to set an alarm or arrange a wake-up call.

He would wake up in time for the six o’clock news, when a fresh newsreader arrived for the morning on the News Channel and the office felt cool and air-conditioned. A new day would have begun. But that was tomorrow. That was another awakening to confront. In the meantime, there was work to be done. At nine, he got a call from a potential client. Then he studied his bank account on-screen, ignoring the message that burned on Tidman’s desk. He was sure that if he looked at the torn corner of ripped page on which Tidman had scrawled Aster’s name, he would hear her shouting at him off the paper. To return the call meant he would be forced to listen.

In the next drawer below the gun lay a sheaf of papers she wanted him to sign. He would not. He could not say why. If he could derive any pleasure from watching Aster dangle, then he might have understood it, but the experience eluded him. He wasn’t even sure if it was an experience he wanted. He did not want to hurt her. He was indifferent to her pain. He was indifferent to her life. Or he thought he was. The unsigned papers and the message on Tidman’s desk nagged at him. At ten, he fielded a call from an old client and took another from a new one, who had decided he would come after all and courageously made an appointment for midnight.

By eleven, Aster’s problem detached itself from the empty walls of his mind and floated to the void in the centre. He could no longer avoid it. He would have to phone her back. He had hoped that she would phone again, saving him the trouble. He reached for his headset just as another call came through. It was not Aster. He could not take a message. He could not risk this caller becoming a stalker. It had happened before. The look in the woman’s eye on the elevator had been a clue. He pulled on his headset and turned off the News Channel.

How did you find me?

She had put on fresh lipstick before making the call. It seemed to glitter on the phone screen. You’re a hard man to trace.

Am I.

Perhaps I should introduce myself. She seemed confident. Her voice was strong. She looked him directly in the eye. Perhaps she found him less scary on a screen. She must surely then also find him less exciting. Gomenzi concentrated on looking as unexciting as possible.

My name is Pearl.

How did you find me, Pearl?

I work for security.

Shit, thought Gomenzi.

You don’t look like a security guard, he said.

I’m not. I’m just a secretary.

Then what can I do for you?

There was a long pause. Gomenzi’s question could not have been less subtle. He knew what she wanted. He just hadn’t decided yet whether he would give it to her.

I want… she began and faltered. She was pretty, thought Gomenzi. In her thirties, good skin, glossy brown hair. Her shampoo must be expensive. Her job must pay well. As a secretary for security, she wouldn’t have access to weapons. But she was in a useful position. He might find her helpful. If it’s for work, it’s fine, he told himself. He had told himself this often. He had told himself this more and more frequently in recent months. He had to be careful. He couldn’t let himself get out of control. Thinking about it made him break out in a sweat. He did not take his eyes off Pearl’s face. He did not alter his expression or shift his body. He appeared to be listening to her fumbling and her giggles, skirting around the main reason for locating him and coming on to him with the coyness of a teenager. Gomenzi might have been embarrassed for her had he cared. But he did not hear her words. He heard only the throb of his blood inside his skull. It boomed as his heart raced. It hammered as sweat ran down his back. He could not take the risk. But he could not resist.

Breakfast, he said, breaking in.

What?

Do you want to meet for breakfast?

So soon, said her face. She was suddenly terrified. She had expected him to turn her down. The whites of her eyes showed on the screen and then she looked down, as if thinking. But he knew she would say yes. He felt no sense of accomplishment. No sense of success. He had done nothing to get this woman. That alone should have made him feel guilty about what he could do to her. But it didn’t. It felt inevitable.

What time? she said boldly.

Did it matter, thought Gomenzi. Within an hour of their meeting, he would be removing her underwear. They would be slippery like silk. He could tell she would shout. A lot. He would not take her to his apartment room. They would have to go to hers.

Suddenly, all he wanted was to talk to Aster. And as he realised it, he realised too that he had wanted it all along.

CHAPTER THREE

Aster Gomenzi lived in a government apartment. Because she was a scientist with highly specialised qualifications and not a lowly clerk, this meant that her apartment was classed as Luxury rather than Functional. She lived in the Nigel’s capital city, which was also the seat of government. All property near the World Council was classed as Luxury. Any property that overlooked one of the many parks surrounding the World Council was regarded as Highly Desirable. Property that commanded the uppermost floor of the highest residential tower was Most Highly Desirable. Split level properties were Pure Heaven.

Aster’s apartment was split over three floors. Stepping into her reception room was like stepping into space. Windows sank below the floor line so that if you walked up to them too quickly, it