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    Angel Station
    Angel Station
    Angel Station
    Ebook537 pages9 hours

    Angel Station

    By Walter Jon Williams

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    ORPHANS OF DEEP SPACE . . .

    They’re outlaws now. Created to serve a function grown obsolete, haunted by the holographic ghost of their father, Ubu and Maria have lived their entire lives skating along the edge of extinction. Now they and their ship Runaway are in flight both from the law and from a predatory clan of competitors. They’re going to come back rich, or not at all.

    But what they find in the depths of space isn’t wealth, but a secret so startling that Ubu and Maria will need every last reserve of guile, cunning, and intelligence just to survive . . .

    “No one can accuse Williams of failing to grow with each new major work . . . Straight-forward space adventure with a strong picaresque flavor. The pacing is brisk, the high-tech details vivid, the rewards to readers considerable.”
    ---Booklist

    “Williams colorfully invokes the life of the trader families and their honkeytonk space stations. With its emphasis on youth, beauty, sex, and mischief, [ANGEL STATION] also conjures a contemporary mood agreeably distinct from its futuristic settings.”

    --Publishers Weekly

    “Williams has it all.” --Analog

    “Williams is a skillfully literate addition to the stylish new generation of science fiction writers.”
    ---Chicago Tribune

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWalter Jon Williams
    Release dateDec 11, 2011
    ISBN9780983740872
    Author

    Walter Jon Williams

     Walter Jon Williams is a New York Times bestselling author who has been nominated repeatedly for every major sci-fi award, including Hugo and Nebula Awards nominations for his novel City on Fire. He is the author of Hardwired, Aristoi, Implied Spaces, and Quillifer. Williams lives near Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife, Kathleen Hedges.

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    • 3/5
      The entire first act was a bit of a drag, but it picked up after that. Still, it's not one of Williams' best. The book is competently written, but the story is somewhat forgettable. There are a couple of completely screwed up pages, but luckily my copy came with an errata page. Hope yours did, too.

    Book preview

    Angel Station - Walter Jon Williams

    Table of Contents

    ANGEL STATION

    CHAPTER 1

    CHAPTER 2

    CHAPTER 3

    CHAPTER 4

    CHAPTER 5

    CHAPTER 6

    CHAPTER 7

    CHAPTER 8

    CHAPTER 9

    CHAPTER 10

    CHAPTER 11

    CHAPTER 12

    CHAPTER 13

    CHAPTER 14

    CHAPTER 15

    CHAPTER 16

    CHAPTER 17

    CHAPTER 18

    CHAPTER 19

    CHAPTER 20

    CHAPTER 21

    CHAPTER 22

    CHAPTER 23

    CHAPTER 24

    CHAPTER 25

    CHAPTER 26

    Excerpt from Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams

    OTHER BOOKS BY WALTER JON WILLIAMS

    ANGEL STATION

    WALTER JON WILLIAMS

    BOOKS BY WALTER JON WILLIAMS

    Novels

    Hardwired

    Knight Moves

    Voice of the Whirlwind

    Days of Atonement

    Aristoi

    Metropolitan

    City on Fire

    Ambassador of Progress

    Angel Station

    The Rift (as Walter J Williams)

    Implied Spaces

    Divertimenti

    The Crown Jewels

    House of Shards

    Rock of Ages

    Dread Empire's Fall

    The Praxis

    The Sundering

    Conventions of War

    Dagmar

    This Is Not a Game

    Deep State

    The Fourth Wall

    Collections

    Facets

    Frankensteins & Foreign Devils

    The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories

    Thanks to Kathleen Hedges for help in formatting this edition.

    Thanks to Tim Hocutt and Mark Probert for aid in producing a legible scan.

    This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

    ANGEL STATION

    Copyright (c) 1989, 2011 by Walter Jon Williams

    Smashwords edition published by Walter Jon Williams

    All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

    CHAPTER 1

    When their father killed himself he recorded the event, just as he recorded everything else of importance in his sad, ill-organized life. I know what’s coming, he said. I know I can’t stop it. Can’t change. I’m sorry.

    When it happened Runaway was in deep space, drifting between singularity shots. Pasco, their father, hung in the air, weightless, in the computer compartment. Fat, ineffectual, his long grey hair and beard floating out around him, he looked like a weeping Father Christmas. Behind him, outside monitors showed a random, slowly rotating field of stars.

    We can’t survive, he said. Not the way we’re going. He swallowed, hard. His hands were shaking as they drifted weightlessly by his sides. He was surrounded by his junk: old computer consoles, malfunctioning holo cameras, tangles of optic wire, battered microscopes, microsurgery and gene-splicing equipment, an old autowomb. All the stuff he’d gathered over the years, gathered as part of a superstition almost, as if all the little bits of equipment, the programs he’d stitched together and run, the sperm and ova he’d tinkered with, the incessant recordings of himself that he’d made, hours on hours, would somehow add up to a whole, would re-create the universe in a way that made sense to him. Would magic him away from the slow death which he, his children, his ship, were facing.

    I’m not adaptable enough, he said. Look. I’ve made you smart. You’re fast. Maybe you can figure a way out of this. I’d just be in your way. A fastlearn cartridge, unnoticed, hung by his foot, making slow-motion pirouettes in the whispering stream of recirculated air.

    If I stay around, I’ll fail. He shook his shaggy head. I’ll go down, and you’ll just go down with me. I’m not strong enough. Not any more. He was drifting closer to the camera now. His children could see the pouched eyes, the broken veins on his nose and cheeks, the saliva that clung to his lower lip. Eyes that were dilated and mad. A stream of red pills, unnoticed, was trailing out of a pocket, spinning into the compartment like drops of blood. I’m going to get out of your way. An overdose. It won’t hurt. Kick my bod out the airlock when I’m gone. He began to cry. Take care of Kitten, he wept. I know she loves me.

    His children waited for him to say more but he just hung there, crying. His massive, rounded shoulders shook as he rotated slowly. His tears hovered in the compartment like jewels. One of the teardrops drifted to the camera lens and adhered to it, refracting motion, colors, a smear of bleeding madness. Their father gasped. I’m sorry, he said again, his voice a husky whisper, and around the splatter on the lens they could see him reaching for the camera to shut it off.

    The screen went black. Ubu reached for the controls with his upper left hand, hesitated, looked at his sister. You want to see it again? he asked.

    She looked at him with her wide, deep-space eyes. She stroked the white cat in her lap without looking at him. The cat’s purr seemed louder than her voice. Erase it, she said.

    Ubu hesitated for a moment, his finger hovering above the Erase button. He wanted the message to contain something worth remembering, some knowledge that would be of use, a final dying piece of wisdom that would help put his father into place, into some synthesis in which his life, their lives, his dying could all be understood.

    There was nothing. Nothing but the final sad crumbling of a mind run out of choices and no longer sane, backed into a corner it couldn’t see a way out of. That and the inane request about Kitten. Ubu understood this. But his longing made him hesitate.

    There was an ache in his throat. He pressed the button. The little electric memory died without resistance, without a sound. The ache didn’t fade.

    Beautiful Maria looked at him. It wasn’t unexpected, she said. She chewed a lip. "We knew he wouldn’t last. That...something... was going to happen with him. She stood, gathered Maxim’s four dangling limbs. Her long blue-black hair fell forward, shrouded her face. I’m going to my compartment," she said.

    Ubu was still staring at the screen, his brows knit. Wanting the wisdom to come. He turned to his sister.

    Do you want company?

    She shook her head. Later, maybe.

    Shall I call you? When I... put him out?

    Beautiful Maria’s hair shimmered like dark rain. Yes. Please.

    Ubu watched as she slipped out of the command cage. Then he turned back to the comm board again.

    A distant shudder came up from the floor, up the chair’s single metal pillar, through Ubu’s spine. A little misalignment in the ship’s centrifuge, the huge bearings burning slowly, metal being shorn away slice by slice. Not critical, not yet. There were years to go before he’d have to really worry about it.

    The fuge droned around him. He’d have to fire his father out the airlock before the next singularity shoot.

    He stood and walked to his cabin, a humming metal shell on the second level of the fuge. The walls and ceiling were covered, every inch, with pictures he’d pasted up. Holo star charts that brought constellations to within an inch of his nose, pictures of nebulae, of black holes, of ships. People suited for vacuum, combat, exploration. Phil Mendoza looking gallant; Michiko Tanaka holding a sizer guitar in one hand, a pistol in the other. Hype-people with painted eyes and lips like drops of bloody dew, gazing into the distance with unreachable longing. Alien creatures imagined or real. Pictures of death, of faceplates spattered with blood, of eyes gazing out in horror. Pictures of his father.

    Ubu sat on his rack and stared up at the ceiling, at the chaos of fading plastic, the images that had once had meaning for him and that now seemed pointless, a ridiculous, childish display of fantasy and longing, no longer a mirror of his mind.

    Suddenly his father was by him, sitting in a chair in the center of the compartment. Pasco was younger, his hair and beard neatly trimmed. Confident, fit. Like the father in the pictures Ubu had pasted to the ceiling.

    Is something bothering you, son? his father asked. Is there anything I can help you with?

    Ubu looked at his father and narrowed his eyes. Get lost, Pop, he said. You killed yourself, asshole.

    Pasco looked at him sadly for a moment. I just wanted you to know that I’ll be around, he said.

    Fuck that. Ubu reached for the control panel and turned off the holo display. His father vanished. So did his chair.

    Ubu’s skin felt hot. He stood on his rack and began tearing at the pictures on the ceiling. They were glued on thoroughly and he scarred them white with the tracks of his fingernails. A rain of plastic fell, a drifting snow of curling white foam. Sobs tried to break out of his chest. With difficulty he kept them down.

    At the end he stood amid piles of ruined chaff. Captain of the Runaway, he thought. Maria didn’t want the job; it was his by default. Bossrider. Singularity shooter numero uno. Captain of all I survey.

    Quietly, he began to laugh.

    I have a plan, he said.

    *

    Beautiful Maria looked up at him, seeing his pale skin and fair hair spattered with flecks of foam. She and Ubu were in computer central, the brass nozzles and long black tubes of tempafoam sprayers in their hands. Two months after their father’s death, they had finally nerved themselves to deal with his belongings. They collected all the rubble, lashed it together, covered it with tempafoam until they could sell it for spare parts at Ascención, their next port of call. Probably the only thing that would bring money would be all the cameras that Pasco had set up throughout the ship to record his activities.

    Maria hooked a stray strand of hair behind one ear. The rest of her black river of hair had been tied back until they returned to the fuge’s gravity.

    What plan? she said.

    Ubu grinned. You know Dig Angel? The Long Reach subsidiary? They’ve got an open advert on the Ascención Station board wanting contracts for Kanto-compatible miners and comps for their new operation in Angelica.

    Be wanting to shoot for whoever’s gonna pick up the contract?

    Better than that, Maria. Better.

    Beautiful Maria rotated gently in midair, hooked one hand around a padded castoff bar on the command cage, then caught the battered old autowomb with her nimble feet. She drew it close, then let go of the bar and rotated, using the tension on the tempafoam hose as a pivot point. She pressed the trigger. The turbines of the portable compressor whined and foam spattered the clear plastic womb where Maria’s heart had taken its first beat, where her developing eyes first turned away from the light.

    Burying my past in foam, she thought. A distant sense of loss hummed in her mind. This wasn’t just Pasco’s gear, this was a part of her life as well. Artifacts of her existence were disappearing, smothering in layers of foam, dying.

    We pick up the contract ourselves, Ubu said. His voice was insistent. We get a loan, buy the miners from the Kanto rep, deliver them in our own holds. Our profit be increased at least a hundred percent.

    Beads of foam swelled over the womb’s control panel. Maria blinked bits of the stuff from her eyes. Why isn’t Long Reach supplying their own operation?

    Be too successful, that’s why. I checked the price of Long Reach stock. They’re expanding so far ahead of their programmed growth that they’re running short of supplies out here on the Edge.

    It’s still funny. Maria wiped sweat from her forehead. She looked at Ubu thoughtfully. And who’s gonna give us a loan, anyway?

    OttoBanque.

    OttoBanque. She repeated the word slowly, knowing what Ubu wanted. A new tension rose in her body, armored her against Ubu’s idea.

    He looked at her defiantly. We’ve got the miners for collateral. And the contract’s just sitting there.

    I don’t like it.

    Look at the figures.

    She looked away. She didn’t want to think about it. What if it goes wrong?

    "What if it goes right?" He kicked off from the black padded shutters that they’d closed over the computer readouts while they were playing with the foam, came to her, took her shoulders in his upper set of hands.

    Maria’s knuckles were white as they clutched the hose and sprayer. I don’t know if I want to do this.

    Let me show you the figures.

    She shook her head. A river of sorrow opened in her heart. Are we really this desperate? she thought. Okay, she said. I’ll look.

    You may not have to. They may give us the loan anyway.

    Yeah. Maybe. Not believing it.

    Knowing she couldn’t resist much longer.

    *

    Words? Ubu looked at his sister.

    Her eyes reflected the light of the monitor, a cold gray glaze, like the glaze in Pasco’s eyes when Ubu had reached out to close them. She raised a hand to her throat. He was old, she said. He tried hard and couldn’t make it. We didn’t know how to help him. He died. She shrugged. I can’t think of anything else.

    A good father? Ubu wanted to ask. He made us out of frozen sperm and ova that he’d bought somewhere, stitched together in a secondhand splicer he’d bought as junk. No genes in common, neither with ourselves nor Pasco, not a real brother and sister and father, just people living together. Gave us talents we’re not sure we know how to use. Jacked our growth with hormone boosters and fastlearn cartridges, machine maturity to go with prematurely adult bodies. He thought we had something to give him, something he was desperate for. We were looking to him for answers, and all the time it was Pasco who wanted the answers from us.

    Ubu looked at the monitor, the heavy body zipped into its plastic tote bag. Good father or not, now a dead thing.

    Ubu had put Pasco in an airlock, not in the trash ejector, wanting him to go like a person and not a piece of garbage. He touched the ship systems board, gave it an order. The hardwired safety codes tagged off alarms, red lights. Ubu overrode them. The lock door blew open, and in a blurred instant Pasco was gone, a plastic-wrapped projectile falling down a long cold curve toward galactic center. A harsh metallic alarm was his last epitaph. Ubu closed the lock and the alarm faded. Red lights changed to green. Tears fell down Beautiful Maria’s cheeks. She stood and turned away.

    I want to take us through the next shoot, she said. Ubu could barely hear her soft voice. Okay?

    If you want.

    I’ll set it up in the computer. I’ll let you know when it’s time. She walked away. She was naked, the way they often were in the ship, and Ubu watched the way her long hair molded itself to the curve of her spine, a river of black contrasting with the warm milk-white skin. Warmth fluttered in his nerves, his stomach.

    Why do I care more about that than Pasco? he wondered. Does it matter that I don’t care more than I do?

    Ubu stared at the monitor for a moment, the gray flickering image of the empty airlock. He stood up, left the control cage, pulled open the door of a maintenance locker.

    Time to deal with Kitten.

    *

    Two months after picking up the Dig Angel contract, Runaway whiteholed out of the Now within a few thousand kilometers of optimal, a week out of Angelica Station. After their radio signal reached the station and returned, Ubu discovered they were in trouble.

    He sat bolt upright and looked at the newsfax coming in. Maxim, disturbed, leaped from his lap. Dig Angel, he said. Gone under. Long Reach crashed.

    We had a contract, Beautiful Maria said. Her voice was jagged with the aftereffects of the singularity shoot, the pulse of the Now. The dreamy quality of it sent a pale blue color into Ubu’s head, contrasting with his own blazing frustration.

    Ubu clenched his teeth. Anger poured up his spine. This was all his fault.

    He cast a look at Beautiful Maria. She wasn’t looking at him, didn’t want to say I told you so.

    Well be on the tail end of a long list of creditors, Ubu said. We won’t get our money in years.

    Another buyer?

    No other small companies in this system. We’re way the hell out on the Edge—there’s only one big city on the planet, and the rest is mining in the asteroids. We’ll have to sell to a speculator. Maybe a rep from another mining company in another system, if we can find one.

    Ubu glared at the newsfax and ran sums in his head. If we can get docking charges and transport, we can be happy.

    Beautiful Maria licked her lips as if trying to taste their options. Maybe we can pick up a cargo to tide us over. Drugs or something, that doesn’t take up space in the cargo bay.

    Better than dying right in Angelica. He began flicking through the newsfax. Let’s see who’s buying. He felt sweat trickling down his nape. Data flickered on the screen. There had to be a buyer somewhere onstation. Had to be.

    If there wasn’t, Angelica was the end.

    The sound of finger exercises came from the upper lounge. Beautiful Maria was warming up on her sizer keyboard. Ubu walked along the smooth green centrifuge carpet and opened the screen. Maria looked up.

    *

    Do you remember Cole Redwing? Ubu said.

    "Vaguely. He was on the Roland, yes?" Her fingers moved precisely over the keys.

    Used to be. Been watching the newsfax coming out of Angel. He killed his family, then himself.

    Maria looked at him in shock. Her left hand hung on one chord, shooting a bright yellow flare into Ubu’s mind. When? she said.

    Fifteen standard ago. Infix Station. The bank had just confiscated his drive.

    Maria looked down at her hand. The chord burned on.

    Though Ubu and Redwing had only met once or twice, Ubu’s mind could sketch him perfectly. Black hair, pebble eyes, soft voice, large hands. He’d used a hammer, the newsfax said. Ubu thought about a hammer in those big hands.

    It used to be years before you’d ever hear of a murder on a shooter ship, Ubu said. Remember? And now there’s two or three a year.

    Killed his family.

    And for a moment they looked away from one another while the sizer chord shimmered on, each thinking about Pasco, about how maybe they were lucky he’d chosen his particular form of self-destructive despair when his time ran out.

    Maria lifted her hand from the keyboard and looked at it as if she’d never seen it before. Get your guitar, she said, and play with me.

    Yeah. He opened the instrument locker and took out his old black Alfredo with the plastic triangular body and the genuine hardwood neck.

    His mind was already buzzing, hard angry chords to call up Redwing and lay him to rest.

    *

    Wherever there were shooters and systers, wherever people lived in the Now, there lived also the zone with which they lived in symbiosis, where they were both fed and eaten. The neighborhood had many names: on Masquerade it was called the Road; on Bezel it was Port Town; here on Angelica Station, it was called the Fringe.

    The Fringe lived in perpetual twilight. It curved gently upward from where Maria and Ubu stood, dark storefronts full of bustle, holograms moving in explosive colors, a population in perpetual transit.

    The main street had no name, being the only one, the long metal road that circled the rim of wheel-shaped Angelica Station. Crowded against it were the small operators that made their living from the commerce of shooters and systers: margin banks, trading companies, gene banks, small casinos, hotels, bars, hookshops, missions for Jesus Rice or the Mahayana Buddha, eateries, cosmetic surgeries, pawnshops... the usual bright, noisy gamut of shops, most facing the street, some turned into little dark side-alleys that curled off the main road, like appendices off some primitive intestine.

    Ubu and Beautiful Maria walked the length of the Fringe, savoring the bright colors, the smells, the exotic flavor of the traffic. Maria bought some chips and fried chicken from a vendor. Ubu bought a recyclable plastic bulb of Kolodny beer.

    Maria had two arms and two legs, not entirely the norm for full-time tide riders. Ubu had an extra pair of arms. Their father had bred them for adaptability, not specialization. Ubu was thirteen years old and six feet four inches tall. The prevailing fashion was for androgyny and he dressed against it, wearing cutoff jeans, sandals, a silver vest hacked out of an old piece of reflec and held together with orange tape. His fair hair was shaggy over his ears. His upper body, massive with overlapping arm muscle, was powerful, a shooter typicality. He moved fast when he wanted to.

    Beautiful Maria was eleven years old and an inch shorter than her brother. She wore a long robe of the same smoky color as her eyes. Her pale face glowed, like cream poured in sable glass, from its soft aureole of blue-black hair. Her voice was soft, her hands moved white in the air like doves. The long hair was unusual in a shooter, but appropriate on Maria. Her name was not inappropriate, either.

    A four-armed shooter, a mutanto, slid by on his easicart, waved an arm that rotated on a hip socket. There was pain in his eyes, distorting a seamless face unworn by gravity. A desperate man, Maria knew, to come all the way to the rim to do business, when he could stay at the hub where his weight wouldn’t crush him and do his business through the phone.

    Desperate. Like the crew of the Runaway.

    At least, she thought, she and Ubu had more choices. If the mutanto lost his livelihood, he’d have little choice but a long-term indentureship to some company like Biagra-Exeter. A contract on their terms, the mutanto being a beggar.

    Maria swallowed a piece of chicken, cayenne pepper burning her palate, then took a shot of Ubu’s beer. Saw the edge of the Fringe ahead, where the twilight turned into the bright white corridors of the Outside Life. A coldness touched her. Uniquip, she said. It’s gone. Look. The Fringe’s got smaller.

    Jesus Rice. It’s only been a few months. He licked his lips. Where we gonna sell our cargo? Hiliners won’t want it.

    There wasn’t a line drawn at the edge of the Fringe, or a sheet of transparent glass set up where the Fringe turned away from the Now, toward the Outside, but there might as well have been. The Fringe was dark, crowded, alive with the pulse of people cutting deals, the whisper of small commerce, the sharp smell of sweat and adrenaline from those who were operating on the margin. Beyond the twilight the metal street had been paved with razor-thin slices of the marble encased in plastic and laid down in big rolls, like toilet tissue. Along the bright street were the big companies, the concerns that stretched all the way across human space, operating their fleets of haulers, stations, liners, their centers of finance and investment... the Outsiders who had the ear of the Multi-Pollies in the center of human space, who wanted the entire universe to be nothing but a succession of white humming corridors, filled with orderly humanity busy accumulating capital, making investments in the safest places, giving it to the Outsiders to finance the Multi-Pollies’ policy of Consolidation, denying the Edge, the margin, expansion.

    Ubu hawked and spat, his saliva arcing out of the twilight, toward the cold fluorescent life of Outside humanity. Fuck that, he said.

    It’s smaller, Maria said again. Sadly.

    Maybe they’ll keep part of the Fringe open, Ubu said. Clean it up a little, then keep it as a place for Mudville tourists. So they can get drunk and gamble away their souls to the Hiline companies.

    "Consolidation," said Beautiful Maria. It was the foulest word she could think of.

    Ubu turned away from the Mainstream. A whore’s metallic laughter floated toward him from the Fringe.

    Let’s go, he said. We’ve gotta do some business.

    *

    Ubu heard the locker close behind him. His right hands held a charged silver glitch rod, two feet in length. There were faded red warning labels pasted on it. A red LED blinked urgently by his hand, telling him it was armed. His finger was near its trigger.

    He felt his arms tremble. His tool chest banged against his left knee. His breath was quick. He paused outside Pasco’s door and wiped imaginary sweat from his forehead.

    He stepped in. The front half of the compartment was empty. Full of disordered junk, fastlearn cartridges tossed on furniture, pictures of the family Pasco had lost in the airlock explosion, printouts lying under a light tracing of dust, unlooked at for years, computer consoles pulled apart and never put back together ... all levels of Pasco’s madness, receding into the years, awaiting excavation like some old desert mound on Earth. Ubu put down the tool chest. His heart pounded. He wiped his face again, stretched out his left lower arm, opened the door into the bedroom.

    It isn’t murder, he told himself.

    The android sex toy was sitting on Pasco’s rack. She looked up at Ubu as he came in. Ubu knew he would remember that forever, the toss of the short blond curls, the flash of the silver-and-lapis stud in her left nostril, the look in the wide green eyes. Seeing the glitch rod, and knowing. Kitten was naked, as Ubu had more or less expected, wearing only the jewelry that Pasco, in his senile passion, had given her. Rings flickered on her fingers, bangles danced from her wrists. A sapphire hung between her breasts.

    Ubu stopped in the doorway. Just go in and do it, he told himself.

    Pop’s dead, he said.

    I know, said Kitten. Her eyes glittered with artificial tears. He left me a message. He said he loved me.

    He would. The glitch rod at the end of his upper right arm seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. He shifted it to the other right hand.

    Kitten had been three years on the ship. Pasco had kept her in his cabin for a week before Ubu found out about her. He’d heard her tinkling, idiot laugh from his father’s double cabin as he passed by, then heard his father’s answering laughter. Somehow he’d known it wasn’t a hype.

    He had just got his growth then, shooting up a foot in the space of a year, and the spurt had left him clumsy. His muscles ached from the onset of mones that stressed him like stellar tides. Passions swept through him like fever: hatred, resentment, lust, fury ... He worked like a demon to exorcize them and did his best to avoid Pasco and Maria, spending his onstation time alone, a solo shooter.

    At the sound of the laughter Ubu stopped in the corridor, turned... and somehow his feet got tangled and he had to throw out his four arms for balance. Unknowing laughter mocked him, leaving a scattering burnt-orange color in his mind, a sour taste on his tongue. Anger rose unbidden. He opened Pasco’s door.

    Kitten stood on a small table, her arms raised, her legs apart for balance. Little-girl laughter tinkled from her throat. Her green eyes looked into his. The laughter continued.

    Pasco was crouched in front of her among a scatter of pills, black and red. His slack furry body was marked with blue and ochre. He was painting her, the spray gun in his hand. Violent colors gleamed wetly across her body. The room smelled of sex. There was something in Pasco’s laughter Ubu had never heard, something that made sharp metallic colors dance in his skull.

    Pasco made a sound in his throat and rose from his crouch. He put his arms around her, pressing himself to her color, smearing himself against her. He reached a hand up behind her back to grasp her hair, pulling her head back as he pressed his head between her breasts. Her laughter never stopped, never changed its tone. Ubu could see the programmed puppet-sounds vibrating in her taut throat.

    Her eyes never left him. Even as he closed the door he could see her watching him through slitted lids. He stared at the face of the closed door, wishing it were possible to forget.

    Kitten’s eyes were open now, watching Ubu standing in the door with the glitch rod in his hands. Tears ran down her face.

    I loved him, Ubu, she said. I’m programmed that way. Programmed to love what my partner loves, a kind of feedback.

    Did he teach you to cry? Ubu wondered. Or did that come in standard programming? I know, he said.

    He knew she was an idiot by most standards, a puppet. Good enough for sex, if your taste went that way, useless for anything else. Even conversation was highly limited, mostly parroting what she’d been told, that and the laughter that sprayed from her whenever her small mind told her the time might be appropriate. A parasite on the ship, unable to contribute even to her small upkeep. Pasco had bought a rich man’s toy and put Runaway in hock to do it.

    She was smart enough, though, to want to survive. Kitten gazed up at him. Licked her lips.

    Do it, Ubu thought. It’s not killing.

    I could learn to love someone else, she said. It’s an easy operation. You don’t have to... use that for it. Just a little adjustment. I could be whatever you want.

    And have me senile by the time I’m fifteen, Ubu thought. Dancing on the end of her robot’s strings while she laughs her idiot laugh. He stepped forward, shifted the rod to his upper set of hands. Kitten flinched back against the wall.

    He pushed the rod out. Remembered paint gleaming on her synthetic flesh, the smell of sex, the sound of Pasco’s laughter.

    You don’t have to do that, she said quickly. I’ll stay out of your way. Her voice rose to a wail. "Why don’t you like me?"

    Ubu closed his eyes, not wanting to see. A fist seemed to tighten in his throat. He pushed the glitch rod forward blindly, swept it left and right with his finger on the trigger.

    A crack of electricity. The fall of something heavy onto pillows. The smell of burning.

    Ubu opened his eyes. Kitten lay crumpled on the rack, a scorch mark on her flank where the glitch rod had touched. She was wiped, her programming erased. Her eyes were open. There was a tremor in her thigh. Her fingers twitched randomly. Already the scorch mark on the synthetic skin was beginning to heal.

    If he’d had the oral codes that controlled her, he wouldn’t have had to do it this way. But only Pasco had the codes. He hadn’t trusted anyone else around his blonde obsession.

    Ubu dropped the rod to the padded floor. He turned and went back to the front compartment for his toolbox. Brought it in, put it on the rack, opened it.

    The smell of burning was still in his throat, unforgettable. He reached out to Kitten’s shoulder, feeling the warm touch of perfect skin. He turned her over. Her limbs splayed over the rack. Ubu took out a knife, cut the skin between the shoulder blades, parted it before it healed. Revealed the control switch. He inserted a screwdriver and shut off the android’s automatic systems.

    Ubu. Maria’s voice, grating in the ship intercom. Fifteen minutes to shoot.

    Ubu took the jewelry from the cooling body. Turned the head, pulled the silver stud from the nose, felt the flesh resist and then tear, knew the small brutal act would be in his mind forever—far longer than the wound he’d just made, which would heal when Kitten was reconnected.

    He put the jewelry in a pillowcase. Sell this stuff, he thought. It would look nice on Maria, but he didn’t want to see it again.

    The sheet under Kitten’s head was turning wet. Her tear reservoir, draining.

    Ubu knew that he was not going to be able to forget this, that he would relive it, the smell, the anger, that final electric snap and the draining of ionized tears ... it would come back to him. He stood up and walked blindly out of the compartment to find another plastic bag. Stuff ’er in, he thought, sell her once we reach Caliban Station.

    He was trying hard not to feel like a murderer.

    *

    Your play? The bouncer leered at Beautiful Maria from behind his window of glass. Teeth gleamed below a mustache sharp as an icepick. Black eyes stared stonily from behind the perfect round metal frames of a black-ribboned pince-nez.

    Beautiful Maria gazed at the double reflections of herself. Blackhole, she said. Red Nine was moving through her veins. Her nerves jittered, flared.

    Stakes? You got, or just looking? The steel smile came again. Mudviller inside, looking for a shooter femme, maybe. Has that yearning gaze anyway. You could be his good luck.

    Ten-twenty, Maria said. She held up a black credit counter. The smile broadened.

    Be my guest, shooter femme. Take my word. Tide riders be lucky at blackhole.

    Especially me, Maria thought. There was an electric buzz as the bolt locked back. She pressed the doorplate and it swung in. The door sighed shut behind her, the lock snapping closed.

    The place was called Stellar City, a deliberately old-fashioned name, a self-mockery. It was on the third level of a ramshackle collection of eateries, a cheap hotel, a used-clothing boutique. Maria had to climb a narrow foam ramp to get here. The walls were made of tempafoam: the place had recently moved from somewhere else on the Fringe, would probably move again before long. The casino was dark, spotlights picking out the active tables. Fringe people, systers, shooters. The room was silent with concentration, sweat, and thought.

    The Mudviller was obvious, overdressed like he was expecting weather here, a middle-aged man staring hopelessly at the naked brown breasts of the woman who was dealing vingt-et-un. Beautiful Maria grinned. Nobody was going to be his luck tonight, not as long as he kept gazing at the distractions the house was throwing in his face.

    Red Nine pulsed in her nerves. The people in the room seemed to move through the smoky room in slow motion. Maria moved to the back, to the blackhole booth. She stepped inside, closed the transparent door. When she sat on the padded chair, the long metal projectors, each topped by a delicate web of stimulus antennae, eased out of the walls with a slow hiss, each pointed at her head. She put the credit counter in the slot. Pressed the button. Black diamond space exploded in her head, filled with burning singularities, the radio cry of dying matter.

    Maria was in a silver metal sphere called a pinball. She floated in the dark vacuum. Distantly, unspeakable gravities tugged at her. The object of the game was to navigate from place to place by dipping into the singularities’ gravity wells, flinging the pinball in and out of the black holes’ embrace. There was a time limit to provide a sense of urgency, and the computer would try to glitch up the ride, introducing random variations: making singularities appear in the path of the pinball after it had accelerated too fast to avoid them, running variations on the stars’ densities, causing fuel shortages, announcing shutdowns of various parts of her navigation aids and simulation screens. She could opt for an easy ride or a hard one, the payoff rising with the difficulty. It was enough like a regular singularity shoot to produce a sense of familiarity, but enough unlike one so that she couldn’t trust her shooter’s reflexes.

    Red Nine burned at her, urging her to choose the maximum. She overrode the impulse and chose a medium level, deciding to stretch her nerves a little first. She placed her bet.

    Numbers spun in the lower right corner of her field of vision, the seconds ticking away. There were cash bonuses if she made her ride in less than seventy-five percent of her allotted time. A destination star glowed briefly, along with the number of black holes she would have to play tag with along the way.

    Okay, she murmured, and began her acceleration. Red Nine fired her neurotransmitters and sparked in her brain as she chose a path, as she felt a gravity well reaching out to touch her. She looked into the black negation before her. Smiled. And felt the pinball moan, torn by the tides of gravity.

    Reflex handled the pinball, its burns and course corrections, its dives into the pulsing wells of gravity. Another part of her mind plotted strategy. And, as she played, as the time counters ran in the lower corner of her vision and the pinball spun along its track, she felt another level of awareness arise, slow and sure, a sense of the electronic world that was the complex computer simulation ... an intuition of the bits of energy that flew at the speed of light and formed the illusion of space, interacted with the decisions that flickered from her mind. The electron world hovered at the back of her awareness, a constant presence.

    Beautiful Maria finished her run in sixty percent of the time allotted. Credit was added to her counter. The illusion of space faded from her mind and she found herself in the close-smelling booth. The sense of the subatomic world was nearer now, without the distractions of the game. She leaned her head back and found it swirling around her. She raised a finger, tracing its patterns in the control panel in front of her ... it seemed almost tangible.

    Red Nine was still urging her. She lowered her finger and pressed the button.

    She felt the pulse through the electron world before the simulation appeared in her optical centers. There was space, filled with bottomless wells. She laughed, placed her bet, and asked the machine for maximum odds.

    Maria would have to orbit each of the singularities at least once, and do it all in the scant space of time allocated ... no room for mistakes. She used the full time allowed for plotting her strategies, the way the pinball would weave its way between stars, then, alarms whooping in her mind, she pushed the pinball forward, maximum acceleration...

    The pinball flattened, stretched, was plucked by fingers of tidal energy. Maria burned fuel, whipped around a singularity, dove for another dark sun. She could feel the electron world surrounding her, and somehow sensed from its pattern that the singularity toward which she was heading would increase its gravity... she plotted a wider orbit, felt gravity slam down hard, put in a burst of power, burst free, true on the course she wanted... the computer’s attacks were supposed to be random, but they weren’t, as no machine’s behavior is truly random, just a part of a large, complex pattern, too vast and too swift, supposedly, for human comprehension.

    The pinball moaned with tidal stresses, Maria was burning fuel at a fantastic rate, cutting down on her margin of safety. Singularities spun by, tried to snatch her. She could feel an alteration in the electronic pattern that meant something about to happen, a singularity about to appear, too close to her path. Fire shot through her veins. She threw her head back, her teeth clenched, thrust up her hands, waved, the tension making her arms tremble...

    She felt her glitch take shape, fly from her fingertips. The pattern altered. The singularity appeared a half second late, after her pinball had already passed.

    She finished in seventy-three percent of her allotted time. The machine paid off at more than thirty-to-one.

    Maria gasped for breath, her heart racing. She could taste sweat on her upper lip.

    She asked the machine for another ride. She laid her bet down. It was the most the law allowed

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