24: Black Market

If it’s your first time here, check out the Table of Contents. You’ll probably want to start with the Prologue.

Elena and the Charon crew stick to the docks after that initial walk around the station. The contrast is stark—while the station is in terrible shape, the black market is booming. The docks are teeming with merchants, guns for hire, smugglers, customers, all overseen by the freelancing security detail. Many ships come here to trade, enticed by the port with no guidebeam and no official authority. There’s always someone profiting, muses Elena.

They don’t want to stick around more than needed. They make short excursions to shop. Terek gets her a prosthetic right hand and a replacement VoidTech graft. Standard Edition graft this time, but Elena can’t tell the difference between this and her previous Tactical Edition. She suspects it’s just branding, to take some extra money out of the military’s budget.

The medic installs them in their improvised med bay, using local anesthesia. She’s wide awake during the procedure, so they talk while he is working. He first attaches the hand.

“You’ll be playing the piano in no time,” he says.

“Seen anything like this on Forge?” She’s curious. His work is fast and precise, like he’s done this many times before. She suspects this type of injury is common in the mining business.

“You wouldn’t believe the shit I saw there,” he says solemnly. “So many accidents down in the mines.”

She can only imagine.

“I’ve seen every limb crushed, arms, legs, spines, necks. Some you can fix, some you can’t.”

Corporate safety standards. She recalls the bright posters she kept seeing on Forge, especially the “Stronger together” one.

“Seen a kid once,” Terek continues while expertly attaching the hand to her stump, “couldn’t have been twenty, no idea how he got down there so young. Cave-in, half his head crushed to nothing. He was still alive somehow when I got there.” He pauses working on her, looks absently in the distance. “Nothing I could do for him.” He shakes his head and resumes the procedure.

“Sorry, Doc. Didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”

“They’re always up, these memories.”

Nothing to say to that. He works in silence for a while. She watches, her arm completely numb, how he uses a complicated-looking gadget to trim the prosthetic into a perfectly fitting shape, activates the nanotendrils that will connect with her traumatized nerve endings.

After a while, he says, “I’m so glad to be out of that hellhole.”

“You and me both, Doc.” She smiles.

“Next time,” he says, “try not to get yourself into trouble, OK?” He is looking at her with grave eyes from atop his thick gray beard.

She can’t help but laugh at that. She’s very much over the spy shit.

“Doctor’s orders?” she teases.

“You bet.” He smiles back, his gaze softening.

“I’m done with it,” she promises.

The only thing she wants is to get out of here. Out of Horizon Station, out of Sector 36. She feels safe aboard the Charon—in good company. On a lark, she imagined herself asking Jaxon to join their “independent logistics” company. But that was just a fantasy. The sector is all bad memories for her, old and recent. Plus, she is positive her latest adventures on Forge got her on some lists. No way one can trespass on corporate property, pull off what she did (how did she do it?) and not expect repercussions.

“Good as new,” Terek says, lifting his gadget up. “Let me wake your arm back up.”

He injects her arm with a stimulant. She feels sensation coming back. The fiber-plastic hand feels alien. Her brain is learning how to interface with the synthetic nerve endings, trying various protocols. She feels pain, then, an instant after, itchiness. The itchiness turns into pinpricks, which eventually morph into the right subset of sensations: pressure, texture, temperature.

“How is it feeling?”

“Pretty good, Doc.” She twists her right hand, makes a fist, opens it. It feels like a part of her. A somewhat clumsy part of her, but close enough to make no difference.

Terek watches her try out the new hand. “Coordination will get better over time,” he assures her. “Let’s do the grafts now. That should be easy.”

Only a small fraction of the population needs grafts, NSRS being a rare condition. But, at galaxy scale, the absolute number of afflicted individuals (or, as graft manufacturers call them, total addressable market) is large enough. Large enough to turn a profit, making grafts relatively easy to find and install. Elena had the same standard ports installed to receive the implants as everyone else. And, lucky her, the energy weapon didn’t damage them. Terek finishes connecting the new grafts in under ten minutes.

“Anything else I can do for you?” he asks.

“My stomach is still bothering me,” she says. And it’s true. She feels good, walks around, then suddenly her insides well up with pain. “Sometimes it hurts when I walk.”

“How bad?”

That’s a good question. “On a scale from stubbing your toe to getting your eye melted off, about somewhere in the middle.” She experienced both ends of that spectrum, the eye quite recently. The pain in her abdomen is not even close to that agony, but she has to will herself to push through it.

“Your wound is still healing,” says the doctor. “It will take time. In the meanwhile, I can give you some stims for the pain. Will keep you going, numb it. But be careful, they’re addictive. Take one if it becomes unbearable.”

“Only in case of emergency,” she agrees.

Terek hands her a pill bottle. He holds onto it as she grabs it, looks her in the eye. “I’m serious.”

“Yes sir!”

Finally, she can get back online. She hated being dependent. Her first order of business is to settle her debts with the Charon crew. The small fortune she got for her mission is almost depleted. Next, she sends a message to her contact on Nova Prime. She is sticking to protocol, the agreed-upon code words, though she finds it ridiculous now. She has no cover—she never had any. But she still sticks to protocol, mostly not to get her contact in trouble. Her message is short and to the point: Business concluded, no deal. Coming for that meetup right away. It roughly translates to: Utter failure. Get me out of here. She shouldn’t have come in the first place.

They’re almost ready to depart, just a few hours to kill while Kaela is installing their new transponder. The rest of the crew is out for a final round of shopping. Elena decides to get out on the docks too. She’s been in a bad way ever since Forge. She goes looking for tacticals. Better to have one and not need it than to need one and not have it, as the saying goes.

She’s now partial to the weapon she got on Verdant—it served her well. Noctics Mark 2. She gets online, using her freshly installed grafts, and checks if anyone has one available. She finds one on the Radiant, a ship docked a short walk away from the Charon. She heads out to make the purchase. Her backpack had more gear, ANTs and combat gloves, a chameleon jacket, but she’s not prepping for more action. The Noctics is just for safety.

The Radiant looks newer and shinier than the Charon, weapons dealing seems to be good business. The ship has a large cargo hold turned into a gun show, rows upon rows of weapons on display. She steps inside. A small group is haggling with one of the vendors at one of the display tables. One of the smugglers not busy with customers steps up to greet her.

“How can I help you?” he asks. She can feel the pity in his voice as he looks her up and down, notices her synthetic hand, the eye patch, and the burn scars on her face. No more beauty pageants for me, she thinks. But she never considered her looks one of her strengths.

“I’m here for a Noctics Mark 2.”

“Right this way,” he says and leads her to one of the tables. She picks it up, feels the comforting weight. She turns it this way and that. It looks exactly like her previous pistol. She checks the sight, thumbs the safety off and on, ensures everything works as it should. A quality piece. She hopes she won’t have to use it. Barring that, she hopes it will serve her just as well as the previous one. He is watching her from the side.

“You know how to handle your guns, miss,” he comments.

She pays for it, a box of ammo, and heads back out on the docks. As she is walking back towards the Charon, she hears voices rising nearby. The commotion turns into a loud argument. A tall blond man shoves a shorter, red-haired one. He stumbles back a few steps then as he steadies himself. He pulls out a gun and shoots the blond in the chest. Elena steps back, hand going instinctively to her Noctics. But she hasn’t loaded it yet.

People are forming a wide circle around the incident, but nobody intervenes. She sees one of the private security people next to her, standing, watching. She asks him, “Aren’t you going to do anything?”

“Nope,” he says, sounding like he’s seen this many times before. “I’m paid to keep the station scum out of here. I’m not police, let them sort it out.”

The shorter man tucks his gun away and stomps out of the circle. People who witnessed him shoot the blond give him room to pass, but soon he becomes part of the crowd, disappears in the sea of people. The blond man is dead, vacant eyes staring at nothing. Elena picks up the pace. Jaxon was right, Wild West indeed. Time to get out of here.

Her stomach starts hurting. She reaches in her pocket, takes a stim, and the pain dulls. The doctor wasn’t wrong, the effect is almost instantaneous. Her focus gets sharper, colors seem more vibrant, she feels stronger. Interesting side effects. She makes it to the Charon without further incidents.

Everyone is there, on the bridge and ready for takeoff. Everyone, that is, except Terek. The doctor stepped out to get medical supplies and seems to be running late.

“Where’s Doc?” asks Jaxon. “I’ll tell him we’re leaving if he’s not back in five,” he says. An empty threat, of course, he doesn’t mean it, but it should get their medic to hurry up. He embeds, comes back right away.

“There’s something wrong.”

“What?” Rynn asks.

Kaela is already embedded, trying to see what Jaxon saw. Elena gets online too, she’s no longer locked outside the digital.

{Doc!} she hears Kaela sending on their shared comms channel.

{Help!} he sends back.

{I got him.} Kaela shares his real-time location with them. He’s close to the Charon. Very close. He is approaching it slowly.

“Let’s get him,” says Jaxon and they all rush to the airlock. He opens it and the doctor falls inside, bleeding.

“Oh my God,” says Kaela.

His shirt is soaked. They take it off, turn him around.

“Stab wound,” he says. Grunts. “Get the med kit.”

“We got you, Doc,” says Rynn.

Kaela rushes back with their first aid kit. Jaxon gestures them aside, grabs a wad of gauze and applies it to the wound, trying to control the bleeding.

Terek coughs up blood. “I think they hit the lung,” he says, gasping for breath.

Elena’s watching this from the side. She feels rage swelling inside her. Someone stabbed him. Someone stabbed this nice man, this man who put her back together, saved her life.

The doctor’s lips are turning blue. Jaxon sits him up, changes gauzes. The first wad is soaked through already. He is wheezing.

“We need a doctor,” she says. Terek can barely breathe; he won’t be able to do anything himself. And they don’t have the skills to address this type of injury; he is hurt way beyond first aid.

“No med help,” Kaela says. “Been broadcasting SOS to the whole dock. Fuck!”

Nobody willing to help, everyone for themselves in the Wild West.

“What about on the station?”

But by the looks of it, they’ll never make it there.

“Doc, can you hear me?” asks Jaxon.

Terek doesn’t answer, he looks around wide-eyed, like he doesn’t know them. Coughs up some more blood.

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