Petrina: A 2070 Novel

By Edward M. Grant

A stripper, a hitman, his target, and a monk with a severed head in his bag. It's a typical passenger manifest for the crew of the space freighter 'Big Momma'.

Russ is hiding from 'Nam flashbacks. Alex may have met her dream guy. Max is tempted to throw them all out the airlock.

They only have to survive a three week flight from the Heavenly Retreat habitat--The Sleaziest Place In The Solar System(tm)--to the remote asteroid, 482 Petrina.

But someone doesn't want them to get there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Banchixi Media
• Release date: May 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781927549094

Edward M. Grant

Edward M. Grant is a physicist and software developer turned SF and horror writer. He lives in the frozen wastes of Canada, but was born in England, where he wrote for a science and technology magazine and worked on numerous indie movies in and around London. He has traveled the world, been a VIP at several space shuttle launches, survived earthquakes and a tsunami, climbed Mt Fuji, assisted the search for the MH370 airliner, and visits nuclear explosion sites as a hobby.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

December 31st 2091

Brother Thomas? said a voice in his head.

He sat at the Core Bar that hung in the microgravity zone on the rotational axis of the habitat, his legs wrapped around a seat to hold himself steady as he relaxed with a mango drink, and pretended to admire the scenery as he scanned the crowd.

A small ultralight floated toward the bar above the neon lights of the entertainment district half a klick below on the habitat's rotating, spherical main body. The pilot’s legs churned on the pedals, providing more than enough thrust to keep it aloft. A couple spun in the air at the far end of the bar, holding each other and squealing when they came close to falling too far to pull themselves back. A grey-haired man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts sat two seats down, drinking beer through a straw and ogling a young topless blond who hung from a large balloon, right at the core. Thomas shivered. He didn't even want to think about the last time he was in Hawaii.

Whoever had sent the message had identified themselves to the skulltop with the correct encryption key to prove their identity. But who was it? With two million bucks of digital cash in his skulltop computer, sending it to the wrong person would be even worse than being robbed.

That's me, he thought back.

His own identity was no secret, which was his other worry about this whole trip. If anyone planned to interfere with his business, they couldn't follow the anonymous contact, but they could follow him.

Why couldn't they have conducted the whole transaction remotely through escrow agents? Refusing a legitimate escrow was a classic scam tactic. Obviously they were being set up. Why couldn't the Abbot see that too?

The ultralight docked to one of the masts around the bar where two other ultralights already hung, then the pilot pushed away and floated across to the seat beside Thomas. He waved at the barman. Beer.

You have it with you? Thomas thought. Just get the job done and get the hell out of there. The monastery had booked a ship to transport cargo back to Petrina, as cover for his return, and the Abbot could take the blame if it was a screw-up.

Of course. But there's no rush, is there?

Was it the ultralight pilot, or one of the others at the bar?

You like flying? Thomas thought. It could even be someone calling in remotely from elsewhere in the habitat. Or one of the ships floating outside.

Keeps me fit. Transfer's going to take a while, so let's get started. We'll trade the cash for the file's encryption keys when it's done.

Sounds acceptable.

Data flowed into Thomas' skulltop, and he passed it through to storage. At the rate it was oozing through the bar's network it was going to take at least another drink. For all he knew, the man was sending him garbage and would just take the money and run, but that was the deal. The Abbot better be right to trust him.

So you're... the voice began to say.

A severed head moves slowly in low gravity. It twisted gently away from the man's neck, the eyes bulging in surprise, as a blade sliced through muscle and bone from behind.

What? the voice said, then went silent as the last hints of consciousness vanished from the eyes.

As it floated past, Thomas found himself looking into the crazed eyes of the man in the Hawaiian shirt as he held up a translucent, blood-smeared blade that had burst through the palm of his hand from the wrist.

For a second, Thomas was as stunned as the others around the bar, the blond girl now watching with her mouth wide open as the head tumbled through the air without its body, and blood sprayed from the neck. He had gone soft, spending too much time in the monastery, away from the real world. But his half-forgotten training returned as Mr Hawaii pushed the body away and grabbed the seat it had previously occupied to support himself while he swung the blade toward Thomas' neck.

Ah, shit.

Thomas tightened his grip on the stool with his legs, and pushed his body backward. The blade passed inches from his face, the sharp facets glowing in the sunlight. Diamond, he guessed, and a blade made sense where the recoil of a gun would be hard to control. It would be next to useless if Hawaii was unbalanced and floating, but the seat was solidly attached to the bar with a metal frame. The barman ducked as the blade swung toward him, but Hawaii was already twisting it around for another attack.

Thomas pulled hard with his stomach muscles to raise his body, then pushed with his legs as he came upright. The blade swung through the air behind him, where his chest would have been if he hadn't moved.

The ultralight pilot's body twisted in the air. Thomas grabbed a leg, and the body swung around. As Hawaii brought the knife back for another attack, one of the body's arms smashed into his face, and the knife plunged into the muscles of its back. The point punched through the rib cage and emerged from the chest, inches from Thomas' eyes.

But most of Thomas' old zero-gravity combat training was useless without a weapon, and he had refused to carry one again. The Abbot should never have chosen him for the job, the World was much too dangerous for a man who had renounced violence. He was just prolonging the fight.

The body twisted between them as Hawaii tried to pull out the blade. Thomas released his grip on the seat and, as the body swung around, let the momentum carry him upward. He pushed away from it, then grabbed the roof of the bar and pulled himself up.

With a long scrape of diamond against bone, the blade pulled free and Hawaii pushed the body away. Then he swung toward Thomas.

Hawaii shrieked as blood exploded from his wrist, and both hand and blade broke free of his arm. The barman clung to the bar railing with one hand and held a rocket pistol in the other. For a second he seemed stunned by the sight, then he fired again. The slow-moving, explosive rockets minimized recoil, but they took a split second to get up to speed. Hawaii dodged to the right, and the rocket hissed past his head.

The blade shone in the sunlight as it tumbled away, and the blond girl screamed as it flew toward her. It slammed into the balloon, which popped with a loud bang, then flew onward. Her arms and legs flailed wildly as she began to fall.

The head was a few metres away, still moving slowly, but gaining speed as the habitat's gravity began its inexorable pull toward the surface of the main sphere below them.

Hawaii lunged toward the barman, his remaining fingers sprouting diamond claws, and his mouth opening to expose two rows of sharp, shiny teeth.

Thomas shut down his skulltop's network connection so no-one could use it to track him, put his feet against the bar and pushed himself away into the open air, as fast as he could.

For the first time in his life, the young man who was now Peter Kaine felt cool. After eighteen years as a spotty white boy with glasses, his first job had paid more than enough to cover the modifications to make him the man he had always wanted to be. Tall and black, with ceramic skeleton, enhanced muscles, a face chiseled like an action hero and a new name that sounded like one.

He'd even paid the medics to put a scar on his left cheek, so he looked like the kind of man who got into fights and didn't care who knew it.

"The Heavenly Retreat was one of the first self-contained habitats, his new skulltop computer informed him, feeding its artificial voice directly into his brain. Built near lunar orbit in the early years of space tourism, it was decommissioned in 2078 and towed out past Mars orbit as a private retreat. In 2085 it was converted back into an open habitat, while retaining the name and lunar theme. With a rotating spherical core one kilometre across, the size limits internal gravity to approximately half of Earth’s, which ensures greater compatibility with visitors from elsewhere in the solar system."

Or so the tourist blurb claimed. Peter had never set foot on Earth himself, or felt the urge to go there. Radioactive ruins full of barbarians, slavers and thrill-seekers from around the solar system were not what he considered a pleasant vacation.

The Heavenly Retreat was small and decayed, and as he strode along the street with a large backpack on his shoulders, he was glad the low gravity didn't weigh him down. But it was cheap, which made it a good spot to find those trying to escape a less than pure past. The new owner had built its reputation on being The Sleaziest Place In The Solar System™, but even that was overrated, 'Sodom and Gomorrah for saps' as one Net guide put it. He'd read of much stranger and sleazier locations in the Blacknet travel guides, many of which even Peter Kaine would be scared to visit.

While some visitors may still wish to bring meat-bots or anonymity suits, the computer said, "the Heavenly Retreat prides itself on minimal internal surveillance. Come to the one place in the solar system where you can Be Yourself, Any Time, Anywhere™."

Peter puffed on a cigar and scanned the street. Strip joints, meat-bot brothels, body-swapping clubs, XP dealers advertising their stock of rape, murder, monster and mutilation recordings direct from the senses of their subjects, a cannibal restaurant, all the recreations of the lowest kind of people... and the perfect place for his trade. Many visitors came for privacy when they indulged their darkest desires, others because they needed the privacy to escape a dark past. The latter were precisely the kind of people he was looking for.

Two drones hummed as they glided through the sky above him on long, slender wings, and, higher still, people flew under their own power in the low-gravity zone near the habitat's axis. He could barely see the far side of the rotating sphere through the air pollution, and even the interior zones which weren't kept dark all day remained in perpetual twilight. The exterior mirrors which reflected sunlight through the large windows were designed for use near the Moon, and far too small for the new orbit much further from the Sun. Stick twenty thousand people into a tin can designed for ten thousand, with decaying life support and recycling systems that are out of action half the time, and you couldn't expect much better. How much longer could it last, before some calamity destroyed it... or, at least, killed everyone inside?

A giant bunny rabbit, pink with multicoloured polka dots, followed him down the street. That wasn't unusual, as it had been following him for days, and danced from foot to foot as it sang something bouncy in Japanese. His skulltop had picked up the adware infection while browsing a monster-porn site on the flight to the habitat, and he'd be glad to get it cleaned up. He didn't even want to know what the bunny was singing about.

The backpack held all his remaining possessions, and it was beginning to weigh his shoulders down. He had a couple of thousand bucks left in his account from his first job, and had considered renting a room at one of the brothels, but he should eek out the rest of his savings until he had more work arranged. He'd find a cheap flophouse and hire some company later.

Repent, sinner, for the Apocalypse is nigh.

A teenage blond and brunette in white robes stood in front of the steep steps leading to the Church of the Apocalypse. It seemed an impressive name for what looked like an old bar painted white, with a sculpture above the doors of an AK47 hanging from a cross.

The brunette pointed at him. Yes, you, sinner.

Didn't the Apocalypse already happen?

The true Apocalypse is yet to come. You still have time to save your immortal soul, the blond said.

Without even thinking, Peter put his arm around her shoulders. His new looks seemed to be changing his behaviour, and she didn't appear to object.

I want to work on my sinning some more first. Perhaps you could help?

We are giving you the chance to save your soul from eternal damnation, the brunette said, not to lead you further from redemption.

He put his other arm around her. You must do some good business here. Except for you two, there can't be a person on this street who isn't damned.

I was a sinner, but now I am saved, the blond said. You can be too.

You still look like a naughty girl to me.

A loud bell rang inside his head. He ignored the girls for a moment as they ranted. The skulltop had found something it thought he should know about. The dancing bunny malware was almost annoying him enough to shut the whole thing down, but he couldn't easily do his job without it.

He was also scared to try to shut it down in case the bunny had rooted the system so badly that he couldn't do so. The pilot on the flight over told him about a man on Ceres who'd found himself stuck in a virtual world of adware and unable to even control his own body to find someone to fix it. Or worse, the Flying Dutchmen, their computers completely taken over, trapped inside bodies others controlled. That sounded almost as bad as the Un.

The computer scanned the input from his optic nerves for potential clients in the Blacknet bounty database. Identification was unreliable in a world of meat-bots, and bodies which could be re-engineered by anyone with enough money, but some people weren't rich enough to buy new bodies, yet annoying enough that someone would pay to see them dead.

On the far side of the road the computer flagged a young Asian girl wearing foot-high stiletto heels, a plaid skirt and a white blouse tied across her chest. She hobbled away from the open doors of the School's Out strip club, the walls plastered with three-metre-tall animated cartoons of girls wearing similar outfits.

Merri Benes, the skulltop said. Contract offer for mother, Lee Benes, from Andrew Benes. $100,000 for proof of death. Escrow via Carter and Ross Security.

More details scrolled through his field of view as the skulltop downloaded the full contract over the habitat's network. Carter and Ross were a well-established pseudonymous escrow agency working through Blacknet, so he knew they would pay up if he could convince them he had completed the job.

The mother's mugshot, smiling on a beach wearing a tiny bikini, was a little on the ugly side of stunningly beautiful, but these days who could tell what was real? If her husband could afford a hundred thousand bucks to have her bumped off, he could afford to have her body modified to his specifications. The contract said she was forty-eight, but she looked barely older than her daughter, so someone had paid for age reversal and stabilization.

Sorry, girls, I have to go and sin some more, he said.

A tall albino man and woman wearing flowing robes, with carbines slung over their shoulders, strolled past on the far side of the street. The bunny danced around them, circled by a pack of stylized Asian girls wearing pink bunny ears and tails and... nothing else.

The Angels were yet another marketing gimmick the habitat owners had tried to bring in customers. Meat-bots, he guessed, from the exaggerated looks and jerky movements. Besides, few people were dumb enough to use their own bodies for security work in a place like this. The murder rate was much lower than a shit-hole like Earth, but between random shootouts, daemons and thrill-seekers it wasn't a job he would choose. That kind of excitement might keep the tourists entertained, but you didn't want it every day.

The Benes girl turned off the main drag into a narrow alley. The habitat map the skulltop pulled up showed the alley lead toward the slightly less cheap and seedy hotel and rental district, so presumably she lived there.

Peter crossed the street, avoiding the Angels, stopped at the corner of the alley, then examined it carefully before he stepped in. He was new to this job, but he still wasn't going to risk an ambush by someone who might already have found his identity on Blacknet. Just as bounty hunters could scan the world for clients, the clients, if they had any sense, would be scanning the world for bounty hunters.

He saw nothing out of the ordinary. A few hookers hung around the entrances of grimy hotels, looking for men too cheap for bots, or perverse enough to prefer real girls, XP junkies lay in the gutters or cardboard boxes, their heads scarred with cheap replay mods. The usual scum of the solar system.

He stepped into the alley, staying in the centre so no-one could grab him from the sidewalk. He passed a furry brothel where a cat-girl swung her butt and waved her tail at him from the window.

Hey, man, wanna buy a leg? a rattly voice said.

A body leaned against the alley wall, the skin tight over the bones, the head mangled with electronics. The eyelids were sewn shut over one empty eye socket, jagged scars crossed the bare abdomen, and a leg and arm were missing. Was it dead?

Then it spoke again. Come on, man, five hundred bucks. We got a raid, I got to play.

What would I do with a leg?

Whatever you want, I just need the cash. Four fifty and it's yours.

He was some kind of virtual addict, selling even his non-essential organs to fund his life in some virtual world. Pretty soon he would be lying in the gutter, until the day his body could no longer function. He wouldn't even know what was happening until his brain just shut down.

How about an arm? the addict said. Bones moved under the skin as he slowly raised the arm and waved. Peter walked on to the far end of the alley. The Benes girl had disappeared, but, if she worked in the club, she wouldn't be hard to find.

The bunny followed behind him, dancing. Ecchi! Ecchi! Ecchi, it sang as the bunny girls danced a can-can.

CHAPTER TWO

Sameer sat at the Big Momma's main console. Not because he needed to sit in microgravity, but he preferred being strapped in front of a joystick to trying to fly the ship remotely with a network link from the skulltop in his head. Not only had the others taught him to fly that way before they could afford to have the skulltop fitted, but, with the poor maintenance record, he didn't trust the ship's computer enough.

Besides, what if his turban interfered with the wireless signal at a vital moment, and he crashed the ship? They would never forgive him.

The console was suspended in the centre of the bridge, which he always considered a fancy name for a metal cylinder and some transparent plastic bubbles for windows. Like many cheap freighters and scavenger ships, it was a collection of cargo containers welded to a frame on a central fission drive core, with the bridge at the highest point for best visibility. At some time in the past the crew had sprayed 'Big Momma' on the side, the red paint now faded from exposure to vacuum and ultraviolet light. The previous year, Russ had acquired three hundred meters of Christmas lights, and convinced Sameer to join him in suiting up on Boxing Day to wrap them around the frame, where they now twinkled daintily red, blue and purple in the darkness of space.

April Fool's Day had added a teddy bear stuck to the outside of the hemispherical main docking bubble at the front of the bridge, arms and legs spread, its plastic eyes staring back toward the pilot. Russ had been on watch that night, and claimed to have fallen asleep while drunk, then woken the next morning and found it stuck there. Now, every time Sameer looked up, he saw those big, black eyes watching everything he did, as though cursing him for running the bear over in the depths of space.

Max floated into the bridge, a tall woman with long dark hair twisting in the air around her head like Medusa's snakes. She grabbed one of the railings welded to the walls and steadied herself.

Have you seen Cleo?

She said it's time she took off my training wheels, whatever that means.

Max pulled herself along the railing and stuck her head into one of the smaller docking bubbles spread around the bridge. The Heavenly Retreat's spherical tourist section rotated slowly for gravity while the microgravity docking and industrial area remained still. They were approaching their docking bay, and it would be a tight fit.

Max pulled herself to the other side of the bridge and peered out of the docking bubble there.

No offence, but I'd rather she was up here flying this thing.

She said I passed my flight tests. Stop worrying.

Sameer watched the docking bay through the main bubble as they approached it, just an unpressurized framework to hold the ship in place for access to the airlocks and cargo.

There's a big difference between flying in deep space and docking with a full cargo load, Max said. These thrusters aren't worth crap with two thousand tons of containers strapped on. She looked back at him with a