Chapter Five
MEMORY’S REACH
SCO STATION,ORBITING THEPLANETSOLACE
THESOLACIANSYSTEM
Elber Malloon backed himself into the far corner of the tiny kitchen compartment, making room to let his wife Jassa open the cupboard and get down a bowl for their daughter Zari’s breakfast, hot cornsoy porridge from the pot on the cooktop. Elber struggled to keep half an eye at least on the view panel set into the wall opposite as two-and-a-half-year-old Zari unfolded her chair from the wall and sat down, happily singing to herself. Jassa closed the cupboard, pulled the table panel out, and set Zari’s breakfast before her. Zari set to work with a will, proudly eating by herself at the grown-up table.
Jassa put the porridge pot in the cleaner, carefully folded the cooktop up out of the way, then snuggled into Elber, wrapping her arms around him.
Elber, still holding coffee in one hand and soytoast in the other, had all he could just to avoid spilling coffee on Jassa, or smearing her with jam. He smiled to himself. It was a pleasure to have such minor problems. He popped the last bite of toast into his mouth, wiped his hand on a borrowed corner of Jassa’s apron, set his coffee down on the pull-out table, and hugged his wife properly. “Good morning to you,” he said.
Jassa looked up at him and smiled. “We’ve already said good morning,” she objected.
“I know—but itis a good morning. A very good one. Good enough to say it twice.” He pointed at the viewscreen. “From what they say, it’s all on schedule. They’ve got the system tests done. The NovaSpot is all set, theLodestar VII is in position, and they’ll be ready when the day comes. It’ll work.”
“Do you really think so?” Jassa asked. She always had less faith in the authorities than Elber, and didn’t hesitate to express her doubts about what motivated the uppers to do whatever they were doing. “Is it really going to bring Greenhouse back to life? Will Greenhouse really save us?”
“I don’t even really know if we need saving,” Elber said playfully. “We’re safe here.”
Safe.That was something to think about. They had lost everything—home, farm, their firstborn child Belrad, their neighbors, their whole way of life. They been forced to start over from nothing in this strange, cramped, inside-out urban jungle of a giant space station. But somehow, in exchange for all that had been taken away, they had been givensafety. No famines for Zari, no mobs, no floods. The trade seemed more than fair. Except for the loss of little Belrad, at the start of their troubles. That was a scar—no, an open wound—that would never heal. But still, they were here, and moving forward, moving upward, andsafe .
“I hope you’re right, Elber,” Jassa said.
“I am,” Elber said, startled by how sure he sounded, how sure hewas . “Things will keep getting better.”
Jassa laughed. “Not if you lose your job, they won’t. Now hurry, or you’ll be late.”
Elber checked the time. “You’re right,” he said. He kissed her good-bye, then knelt by his daughter and was rewarded with a porridge-coated embrace. He glanced up at the viewscreen again. He would have loved to stay home and pull up a more detailed report, but the job came first. Besides, they were merely getting ready. Nothing exciting to watch.
Elber stepped to the apartment’s cramped bathroom and washed the porridge off his face. He looked in the mirror and laughed. What was the old saying?Life is what happens while you’re doing something else . They were preparing to remake a world out there—but he had to get his daughter’s breakfast off his face and go to work.
Elber left their apartment and started his walk through the maze of corridors and elevators and stairways that made up the low-rent districts of SCO Station’s Aft End. Not so long ago he had dreaded stepping out of their door, for fear of getting hopelessly lost—again. Now he followed his usual route to work without a moment’s hesitation, finally getting clear of the Aft End econoflat complex and on to the larger corridors.
After a few more minutes’ walking, he stepped across the threshold into Ring Park. As always, his heart skipped a beat as he did so. Elber walked through the park every workday morning and evening back and forth between his family’s small apartment on the Aft End and the cubicle he shared with three others in shipping operations on the Forward End. But no matter how many times he made the brief transit of the park, that sense of shock was always there.
Once, not so long ago, he had been a refugee in the big Collapse Panic,a squatter, a gluefoot, stuck on SCO with no place to go. And he had livedin Ring Park ,in the open air —or as close as one got to open air on the station.
And now,he didn’t live there .He had a proper job, and his family had a proper place to live.
These days, long after the crisis was over, he could almost bring himself to believe that he had a right to be on Solace Central Orbital Station, that hebelonged there. But then he would cross into the Park, and walk past the very spot—long since relandscaped and all prettied up again—where his group of refugees had set up camp and torn up the trees to burn campfires in a futile attempt to keep themselves warm. Even now, Elber’s cheeks burned with embarrassment when he thought of that, and of how pig-ignorant of stationside life they had been to try such a thing, how totally unaware of how the station’s thermal control system worked. They might as well have drilled a hole through the outer hull to let in fresh air.
But now he knew better. He was nearly, if not quite, a station man. He had learned fast in his new job in the shipping office. But for all that he had learned his new job, and even if he wore a grey tunic and blue trousers and clean dress shoes and carried a datapad, there was much about him that still said “farmer.”
He was tall for his people, about 180 centimeters, with long gangly arms and legs, and a slim, wiry build that made him look taller. His hands were hard and callused still, though far less so than they had been on arrival at SCO Station. Shut away from the sunlight, here inside the station, his farmer’s tan had faded as well, and his blond hair had turned several shades darker. At times, his dark blue eyes, oval face, and habitual shy, slight smile made him seem almost childlike, though what he had been through should have hardened him long ago.
Elber walked past the smoothed-over lawn where the gluefeet had tried to bury their dead in the ten centimeters of topsoil and gravel that were all the living soil the Ring Park had, and remembered that, as well. When Station Security took away the dead for what they called “proper disposal,” things had teetered on the knife edge of riot before calming back down.
And then—then, after a half dozen provocations had failed to produce an explosion—then the explosion came, for no good reason. For no reason at all, bad or good, other than Zak Destan.
The gluefeet men were bored, they were restless, and they had been pushed around long enough. When Zak had led a bunch of the lads out to have a drink on the Long Boulevard, all it had taken was an argument with an aggressive bouncer to set them off. But it was Zak who had led them that night, and it was Zak who had gone looking for trouble.
Elber had been part of the group. He had run for the camp in the Park at the first sign of trouble, and had never quite decided, even deep in his own heart, why he had done it. Was it cowardice? Prudence? The instinct to be with his wife and child, to protect them when trouble was brewing? Had he done the right thing, or the wrong one? Either way, had he done it from good motives, or bad? Did it matter now, and had it ever?
He stepped through the Forward portal of the Ring Park, and onto the Long Boulevard. There, too, where the riot had started, and done its worst damage, all was clean and tidy again. The sidewalk cafe where Zak had picked a fight was still there, although under new management, and, of course, every stick of furniture, every glass and every bottle in the place had had to be replaced. Elber felt a completely irrational twinge of guilt over the damage every time he passed the place. He had, after all, been just about the only one there whohadn’t joined in the destruction.
But the riot didn’t matter anymore, either, and nor did who had done what. Not anymore. That was the clear message that came in from every corner. The claims had been paid. The investigations had all ended—or, more accurately, had all unraveled after learning very little that everyone didn’t already know. The last of the gluefeet had been dealt with—shipped back down to Solace, nearly all of them, with a small handful, like Elber, staying aboard SCO Station and finding work. Everything and everyone swept away or tidied up, the scars hidden discreetly under the new-planted trees and the fresh coats of paint.
Elber smiled to himself as he turned off the Long Boulevard and entered the elevator that would carry him to Station Level Six, where the shipping operations center was. Things changed so fast. Now, in his present job, one of his duties was checking the insurance status of every outbound cargo. Six months ago he hadn’t fully understood the concept of insurance, and now he was documenting premium payments, checking risk assessments, and comparing actuarial tables.
He arrived at the shipping office and made his way to the large, crowded, cramped back room that he shared with thirty other shipping clerks. He elbowed his way through to his cubicle, smiled a greeting at Fredor and San—Jol, his fourth cubicle mate, had not yet arrived—sat down and set to work.
He looked to his datapad, brought up the first file in his docket, and frowned at the words that jumped out at him.Risk assessment revision . He had seen those words more and more often in the last few months—and they never meant that the assessed risk was going down. And when the risks went up, the premiums went up.
But it wasn’t all the travel routes that were suffering risk spikes. The pattern was there, as clear as day, and this one fit in with the others. The cargoes outbound for Greenhouse and the orbital habs all arrived without unusual mishap. But the cargo going the other way, from Greenhouse and the habs through SCO to Solace—well, cargo that landed on the planet had a nasty habit of not getting where it was going. It was getting chancier and chancier to ship anything on the surface, through the countryside. He scanned through a whole series of reports.Lost in transit, damaged in transit, incomplete inventory on arrival, pallet listed on invoice not delivered, shipment did not arrive.
There were a lot of names for it, but it was plain to Elber that a lot of cargo was vanishing. And yet, no one seemed willing to use the wordtheft. Which in turn suggested to Elber that people on the reporting end were afraid.
Elber glanced around the roomful of clerks, and, in his mind’s eye, at the huge spinning station full of people beyond. There were, he knew, merely a handful of people aboard who had any recent extended experience of life on Solace. Most of those aboard had lived in space for years, on SCO Station or elsewhere. A fair number had been born on the station, and had never once left it. And, as things on-planet got worse, there was less and less incentive for anyone to visit the surface. Of those whodid visit, few would stray outside the upper-class areas of Solace City.
In other words, it was unlikely that there was anyone else aboard SCO Station who knew the first thing about the countryside of Solace and also knew about the shipping business.
What the pattern of thefts told Elber was that the reivers were back. Or perhaps they had never been shut down in the first place, despite all the pronouncements from Solace City, years ago. Come to think of it, it did seem to him that the government had announced their eradication more than once. If they’d been completely wiped out, why would anyone need to kill them again?
The reivers used techniques that stretched back at least to the near-ancients, based on the principle that it is easier to run a criminal gang in places far removed from the central governments, and in places where the locals are at least willing to tolerate you. And the best way to ensure that they did tolerate you was, of course, to buy them off, while being careful to do it in a way that let them at least pretend to keep their dignity.
Make a gift of a new water purifier to the village elders and slip the mayor some cash to pay for its installation—ten times more than the job would really cost—and who’s going to ask the mayor what happened to the rest? Fix up the old school, and the parents will be grateful enough that it will be thought bad manners to ask if the building materials were stolen. Show up at local weddings and festivals and hand out lavish gifts often enough that people come to count on them as a normal part of the celebration.
See to it that slightly bad things—or even very bad things—happen to people who object, or who ask questions. Keep at it for a while, and the villages will resent the hell out of the Central Police who come and try to shut down the local benefactor. A nice man like him couldn’t possibly have committed that murder, or robbed the bank in that town a hundred kilometers away, or run that smuggling ring—and even if he did, well, the people who got hurt were outsiders.Our reiver watches over his own people. Besides, he is so strong. We couldn’t fight him even if we wanted to—so why not enjoy the wealth he offers us in exchange for just a little silence?
Elber knew the story from the inside. He had grown up listening to romantic adventure stories of the reivers, told in the village inn or around campfires. Robbing the fat upperclassers who got what they had by squeezing the peasants, using the booty to stop the widow’s farm from being sold away from her or to save the village girl from a marriage she couldn’t abide. Propaganda, they’d call it on the station. Or, perhaps, marketing.
Child and adult, he had played along. There had been a grand gift of two healthy cows and a store of hay at his wedding, and a wad of cash as well. Elber had been pleased, but not surprised. It was part of the natural course of things.
So when the Center Cops finally did make a move that meant something, and dragged away Smit Sarten, the local reiver king, Elber had been as hurt and confused and resentful as anyone. And, somehow, the way the Center Cops rubbed the hard evidence of robbery, murder, and smuggling in the locals’ faces made them angry at the cops, not at Sarten. The old crones still had a warm place in their hearts for him. He was just a mischievous boy, not a cold-blooded murderer.
But, even so, for a time, at least, the cycle had been broken. Until, just recently, it started up again. It was a lot to read from the cautious phrasing in a few insurance claims, but Elber knew his people, knew the way rural life worked on Solace.
But who could he go to with his warning? What did he have, except for vague suspicions? He might be able to talk to Beakly, his department head. But what couldshe do, except pass it up the line? What would be the final result? They’d raise the premiums, perhaps, but they were doing that anyway. And if Elber could read the return of Smit Sarten’s sort from as far a remove as claim reports on SCO Station, no doubt the Central Solace Police Service could do so from closer in and with far more information.
But even if he could or should do nothing, it was worrisome. The reivers didn’t come out when times were good, or stable, when the government was strong, and people had faith. Things were getting worse.
Rumors about graver, deeper problems planetside had been floating all over the station for months. If the Central Cops could no longer keep a lid on the reivers, that made Elber that much more willing to believe the situation was still deteriorating—and faster than they were being told. His confident prediction to Jassa that morning, his promise that things would keep getting better for his family, suddenly sounded horribly false.
Elber’s own village had been caught in surprise spring floods that had never receded. His village was still underwater, and the last Elber had heard, the local officials had finally given up pretending that the waters would ever recede—and that was far from an isolated incident.
But even if things might be bad, and getting worse, back on the planet, there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Besides—it was nothing to do withhim . Not anymore. Elber shook his head and tried to focus on his risk evaluations.
“Elber Malloon?”
Elber looked up sharply. It had been a long time since anyone in the office had addressed him by name. He wasn’t of high enough rank or sufficient consequence for it to be worth their while to learn his name. But he saw as soon as he looked up that this was not someone from the office who had taken a sudden interest in low-level functionaries. People who worked in the shipping office did not wear the uniform of the Station Security Force.
Elber suddenly realized that the entire office had gone silent. Everyone was looking at him, and the SSF officer. “Ah, yes, that’s me.”
“Come along,” said the SSF cop. “You’re wanted downstairs.”
Elber stood up uncertainly, his heart pounding. “Ah, ah, all right,” he said. “I’ll have to clear it with my supervisor.”
“She knows all about it,” the officer said, casually gesturing in the direction of Supervisor Beakly’s office. Sure enough, she was watching along with everyone else. She nodded once at Elber, her expression puzzled, perhaps a bit worried.
And in that moment, Elber saw the ruin of his world in her face. All his endless efforts to work hard, show good faith, earn the trust of his superiors—all of it was gone in a blink of an eye, the turn of a frown. If they had come for him at home, perhaps it could have been all right. But not now, not after arrest in front of the whole office. Why would any of them have the slightest reason to take a chance on him now? His hopes and plans for a comfortable future for his wife and child, a safe future here on the station, had vanished like a soap bubble stuck with a pin. It was all over.
He gathered his things and meekly followed the officer out of the room, not looking back, looking no one in the eye, refusing to hear the murmuring tide of voices that swelled up behind as he passed through the big room.
It was not until they were out of the shipping office, and in the corridor, that it even occurred to him to wonder why he had been arrested. Even then, it never entered his head to ask the SSF officer. Elber had lived his whole life in a world where no good could possibly come from questioning an authority figure.
So Elber said nothing, asked nothing, as the SSF man led him to a waiting open-bodied free-runner car. He took his seat and did not even listen as the policeman spoke to the car and told it where to go. The car turned itself on and rolled off down the labyrinthian corridors.
The policemen spun his seat around so that he faced Elber in the backseat. He smiled at Elber, and seemed to expect him to have something to say. But Elber still kept silent. “One of the quiet ones, huh?” the policeman said, and shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
The free-runner whizzed along the corridors, rolled itself onto a cargo elevator, and decanted itself just off the Long Boulevard. It instantly started off again, heading back toward the Aft End and Ring Park, retracing Elber’s journey of the morning. The car threaded itself neatly through the busy vehicular traffic. Soon it was at the bulkhead opening that formed the entrance to the Park itself. It rolled inside, then turned off the main road onto a side path.
Elber saw the cop watching him. Elber had lived in the Park, squatting with his family on that patch of ground right there, not twenty meters from where the car was rolling. And the copper knew, and knew that Elber knew. He wanted to see Elber be embarrassed, or ashamed, or just plain scared.
Elber felt reflex take over, turning his face impassive, unreadable. A smart peasant didn’t let cops know when he was worried. The clerk, the desk worker, the station man was already vanishing, exposing the lost and bewildered peasant dirt farmer underneath, bringing the old habits and survival skills to the surface.
The free-runner came to a halt beside a low building set into an artificial hillside inside the Park. There were a remarkable number of people coming and going from the place, from all corners of Ring Park.
With a shock, Elber realized what the “building” was. It looked very different than it had when he had lived in the Park. Then it had been surrounded by guards in olive-green assault fatigues, the grass had been burned off and blackened by an accidental brush fire, and the landscaping around it had been chewed into a muddy brown pulp by marching feet in combat boots and the comings and goings of severe black command cars that seemed to drive everywhere but on the designated roadways.
Now the grass was a lush green carpet, the vehicles were free-runners painted in cheerful pastels, the pedestrians were civilians dressed in stylish, brightly colored office wear, and everyone kept politely to the paths.
Elber and his sort had never gotten within a hundred meters of this place, or the others like it. The guards had been there for the express purpose of keeping gluefeet away. It was one of the entrances to DeSilvo Tower and the Gondola, the massive structure that hung off one side of the spinning station. DeSilvo Tower was actually three giant glass-and-steel towers that formed the legs of a massive tripod, topped off with a six-sided office building, generally known as the Gondola. It held the poshest, most grand homes and offices on the station.
They had expended endless effort to keep his sort out of the Tower and the Gondola. And now Elber was being taken there whether he liked it or not. And he most decidedly did not.
They shot down an incredible glassed-in elevator car with a view of the wheeling, gleaming exterior of the station and the shining world of Solace far below, then dropped into the six-sided jewel that was the upper side of the Gondola proper. Elber stumbled a bit as he exited the car, half from shock and half because he suddenly weighed more, so much farther out from the station’s spin axis. The cop led him along to another elevator—no ornate glass box that looked out on wonders but just a simple steel lift. The doors shut, and Elber watched the floor indicator on the forward display count down.Upper Level ,5, 4, 3, 2, Lower Level . Then the display went blank, and Elber was alarmed to see that the car kept moving, as if it were dropping down past the bottom of the Gondola, headed straight into space where—
Then the car did stop, and the door opened. The cop gestured Elber to step out. He did, onto a greyish silver floor. Something in the floor wasmoving. He glanced down and realized that the movement laybeyond the floor, outside. He was looking down at Solace, spinning past, dimly seen, beneath his feet. At last Elber realized where they were, and knew that they were as far “downstairs” as anyone could get at SCO Station. He had read about this place. Everyone on the Station had.
They were in the famous commander’s office, at the very base of the Gondola, a room with a smartglass floor and smartglass walls that looked out into space and let one watch the universe roll past as the station spun on its axis and orbited the planet below. A grand view, but a supremely distracting and disconcerting one, so much so, the news stories said, that the commander usually kept the walls and floor opaque.
Or at least,thought Elber as he watched the planet wheel out of sight and dim stars come into view,the commander tried . The smartglass was supposed to dial down to perfect opacity, but Elber had read in the same somewhere that the smartglass all over the station was beginning to wear out, the opacifiers no longer reacting as quickly or as fully as they were supposed to do. Even there, in the commander’s office, it would seem the smartglass was not working as well as it should.
“Elber Malloon,” the SSF officer announced. Elber looked up and realized for the first time there were other people in the chamber. Two other people, and he recognized both of them at once. The dark-skinned bald man with a seemingly permanent frown sitting behind the big desk was Karlin Raenau, the station commander. Elber had seen his picture often enough to recognize him without trouble. The other man was standing by the desk, wearing an SSF uniform. He was short, burly, olive-skinned, black-haired, with a beaklike nose and hard grey eyes under bushy black eyebrows. Elber had seen him in person, plenty of times, commanding the crowd-control squads against the gluefeet. It was hard to imagine a gluefoot not knowing Captain Olar Sotales, director of Station Security. Elber’s own little daughter Zari still had nightmares about being chased by the Sotales monster.
Elber’s bewilderment transformed into utter shock. These were the two most powerful men on the station. What in the name of dark devils could he have done that was bad enough that it could bring him before them?
“Glad we finally found you,” Sotales said. “We’ve been looking for a while now.”
“Do you know where you are?” Raenau asked. “Do you know who we are?”
Elber felt as if he were in fact a gluefoot, rooted to the floor. He nodded without speaking and swallowed nervously.
“Good,” said Raenau. “So we can get started. The situation is getting serious, and we need to do something.”
What was getting serious? Do something about what? Why were two of the greatest and most important men on the station concerned with Elber Malloon? What could makehim that important?
More out of bewilderment than anything else, Elber finally worked up the nerve to speak. “Sir? Please—if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, can you please tell me why I was arrested? I mean, what the charge is? What am I accused of, I think you call it.”
“Arrested?” Raenau asked, apparently surprised. “You weren’t arrested. You were invited to answer a few questions and to see if you could help us with a problem. That’s all.”
From some part of himself he barely knew, formed more from fear than nerve, Elber Malloon found the courage to contradict the man in absolute authority over him. You never dared argue with a copper. But sometimes—sometimes—you could appeal to the big uppers, the sort who assumed their cops and overseers treated the lowdowns as nice as nice and were surprised when things weren’t like that.
“Sir, I’m sorry, sir, but, well, sir—this officer came to my workplace during business hours, spoke to my supervisor before looking for me, had her point me out to him, then told me I was ‘wanted downstairs’ in front of all and everyone.”
Raenau frowned thoughtfully. “I see. That makes it sound bad for you. Is that how people get arrested back home?”
Elber nodded stiffly. “Pretty much, sir. Everyone in the office thought I was being arrested.I thought I was. My boss thought so.”
“We’ll make sure they know it was a mistake,” Raenau said.
“Well, ah, sorry sir, but—I saw the look my boss gave me, sir, and Iknow I’ve lost my job already. I’m cooked. Fired.”
“But you’renot being arrested. Why would they fire you over answering some questions?” Sotales demanded.
“They has a thing they says,” Elber answered, half-conscious that his speech patterns were drifting back from station man to the phrases of a lowdown peasant. “‘If it smells bad, it is bad.’ They don’t like things that don’tlook right in my office. My boss always talks about not wanting scenes and scandals. There’s lots of confidential info we see, and they don’t take chances on their people. If they aren’t sure of you all the way through, you’re out—and my boss can’t be sure of me at all anymore. Maybe some uppers—uh, higher-ranking people—might get a second chance, but not people like me.” The speech astonished Elber himself. He had never dreamed of saying so many words, or words so blunt, to the big boss.
Sotales looked toward the cop who had brought Elber in. “Is his account accurate?”
“Um, well, yes, sir. You just told me to bring him in to answer questions, and I didn’t think—”
“Obviously you didn’t. Stars and devils, Jentens, if this man loses his job, why the hell should you keep yours?”
Jentens opened his mouth and shut it again, and he seemed to decide he couldn’t do himself any good by saying more.
Sotales glared at Jentens, and somehow that one look was worse than the worst shouting-down Elber had ever had. Sotales muttered something very unpleasant under his breath, then gestured toward the elevator. “Get out of here,” he said. “I’ll deal with you later.”
Jentens turned beet red, then saluted, spun on his heels, and stepped back into the elevator car. He pushed a button, and the car lifted itself back up out of the strange room. The opening through which it had come irised shut in smooth and perfect silence, leaving only the thinnest circular scribe on the ceiling to show from where the elevator had come.
Sotales turned his attention back to Elber. “Sit down, son,” he said. “Let’s see if we can work this thing out.”
Elber stepped forward and perched uncertainly at the corner of the big and expensive visitor’s chair, and found himself looking up at Commander Raenau, seated in majesty behind his enormous desk, and at Sotales, standing at his side, the loyal and powerful lieutenant ready to do the great leader’s bidding. A part of him knew the furniture had been chosen and arranged to make the effect happen—but knowing didn’t stop it from working.
“I don’t know if there is that much to work out,” Raenau said with a crafty smile. “The plan always was that we’d take care of Mr. Malloon. Now he just has a bit more incentive to helpus out.”
“I—I don’t understand,” Elber said. Even in his confused and terrified state, the thoughtgood cop, bad cop flitted through his mind. They were both being good cops, and letting Jentens be the bad one. He realized it had all been a performance, a show. Jentens was more likely to get promoted than fired for the day’s work.
Elber knew how it worked, knew they were pushing him around, trying to trick him. But even though he understood it was a trick, he knew the trick was going to work. They could do with him whatever they liked, and there was nothing he could do to stop them.
“Help us,” said Commander Raenau. “Help us, and we’ll help you.”
“With what?” Elber asked.
“Not so much with ‘what’ as with ‘who,’ ” Sotales answered.
He handed Elber a datapad. It was looping a security camera recording, showing the very start of the Long Boulevard riot, of the moment when Zak Destan brought a wine bottle down on top of an enforcer’s head and touched off all the trouble.
Zak. Zak Destan. Now, at last, Elber was beginning to understand. An enhancement grid locked on to one scared-looking, blurry face at the edge of the action and brought it into sharp focus. It was his own face—dirty, half-starved, terrified, Elber at the absolute worst moment of his entire life.
“We had the faces,” Sotales said. “But no names, no I.D.s. We got lucky when we checked station records. We want to talk with you about Zak Destan.”
Whatever tiny shreds of hope Elber had begun to feel were swept away. Suddenly, once again, the future was nothing but blackness. Elber had done nothing wrong that night, but Zak had done plenty—and in the world of the lowdowns, association was all that it took to draw a guilty verdict—and a long, unpleasant punishment.
In Elber’s soul, that punishment had already begun.