Hoqalo: [Book 3] Chapter 146

“Nobody reads clause eleven.” The clerk clipped the board. “Clip the badge on. You’re crew now, congratulations.”

I clipped it on.

The machine didn’t care who I was; it only cared that I’d ticked a job I didn’t have. I decided I liked that better than the cell.

“Briefing’s over there.” He pointed the stylus at a scuffed kiosk against the wall, one screen and a bench bolted in front of it. “Crew are owed a cargo-securing briefing. Watch it, don’t watch it, it plays either way. Boarding’s called in twenty.”

The briefing was a recording of a woman in a TED polo standing in an empty hold, explaining with great warmth how to lash a pallet, tension a cargo strap, and identify a compromised tie-down before it became everyone’s problem.

I was the only escort watching it.

Two rows of empty bench sat between me and a second man who had his eyes shut and his own duffel between his boots and was, correctly, not watching it.

Duncan: Hey, Dash! Asti asked me to pick you up, where do you land?

I decided not to panic at my own incopetence again and didn’t even tell Asti and instead I copied what was on my pass.

Me: Thanks! I’ll landing at LunaFreight, portside

Duncan: Got it

I went back to the bliefing. I would not be lashing any pallets, but I watched the whole thing anyway because it was free and because I had twenty minutes, and by the end of it I could confidently identify a compromised tie-down.

Boarding got called.

The Diligent was not built to be looked at.

Where the Lutivex liner had been squat and sleek in its business-travel way, this was a box with engines.

Literally just a box.

A freight hull, blunt at both ends, the passenger—sorry, the escort—hatch set into the side as an afterthought, between two enormous cargo doors that were the real reason the ship existed. We went in through the small one, up a ramp, into the payload core.

There were no seats. I’d known there’d be no seats; the man had told me, the fare had told me, clause eleven had told me, but knowing it and standing in it were different things.

The core was a long steel volume with tie-down rails running floor to ceiling and pallets already lashed down the centre, strapped and netted and stamped with hazard chevrons, riding home as the ship’s actual cargo. Down each side, against the bulkheads, ran the escort webbing; harness frames bolted to the wall at intervals, a strap rig at each one, room for maybe thirty of us. Maybe a dozen were filling in.

And every one of them was armed.

The man ahead of me had a diver’s license clipped next to his escort badge, and a hardcase slung that was the wrong shape for luggage.

A woman two frames down thumbed a sidearm’s charge readout, checked it, and put it away.

Nobody looked twice at my sword, or at my guns. On the Lutivex ship, they hadn’t let me smuggle so much as a knife off-planet. Here I was the most normal-looking person in the room, because here everyone was a working Diver on the cheap fare, and a working Diver came with tools.

A crew member, a real crew, in a proper TED jumpsuit, walked the line and showed me the harness without being asked, a quick two-handed cinch, chest and hips, clip here, and the webbing took my weight when I leaned back to test it. I got the bag lashed to the rail beside me on a spare tie-down, which was the entire and only cargo-securing I would perform on the trip.

The briefing had paid off after all.

Then the ramp came up, the hatch sealed, the core lit on its own harsh work lighting, and there were no windows anywhere, because a warehouse doesn’t have windows and this was a warehouse that flew.

“Escorts, brace the line,” came a voice over the speakers. “Ascent in ninety seconds. Enjoy the free gravity while it lasts.”

The launch cradle pushed us, and then the primary burn came on and pressed me back into the webbing, and for the whole climb I had weight. My own weight, dragging me down into the harness while the hull shook, and the pallets creaked against their straps and the deck under my boots meant down the way a deck was supposed to.

The burn cut.

And the floor let go of me.

There was no lurch, no drop, nothing so dramatic, just the press easing off my chest and then, in the same moment, my body finding out it didn’t weigh anything, my arms wanting to drift, my bag straining gently up against its tie-down, a loose strap-end rising off the deck beside me to hang in the air like it had somewhere to be.

My stomach lurched when somebody down the line swore and someone else laughed, and the laugh had the same swallowed quality every sound had in here.

So that was the fare. No viewport, so I couldn’t see out. No gravity, so I couldn’t stand. Just a long steel box, harsh-lit, full of armed strangers hanging in their harnesses in the dark between two worlds, everyone strapped to a wall because the alternative was to spend the whole coast bouncing off the cargo.

I hung there in the webbing with my bag drifting at the end of its strap and thought about things. About which rune I wanted to pick, about the Moon and Mars and about everything that happened since I got the system.

It lasted a little under an hour.

“Escorts, brace the line. Arrival burn in sixty. Gravity’s coming back.”

The burn came on, and the floor came back with it, and my bag settled onto its strap and the loose gear drifted down and my own weight poured back into my boots as the Diligent leaned into its approach and bled off speed against the Moon.

“Welcome to LunaFreight,” the speakers said, with no more warmth than they’d managed for anything else. “Escorts disembark via personnel egress, portside. Mind the gravity.”

The hatch opened onto a warehouse.

I’d half-expected the clean white landing hall from Lutivex, the harsh everywhere-light and the polished floor throwing it back at you.

This was the loading dock behind that.

LunaFreight was a cargo receiving hall and nothing else, so tall the roof was lost up in the shadow of the gantry cranes, pallet lanes taped across a raw concrete floor, forklift drones already nosing toward the Diligent’s big doors before the escort hatch had finished opening.

The air was cold and smelled of lubricant and rock dust. There were no windows here either, and they weren’t spending mana on gravity in here either, because a warehouse doesn’t need a full g and neither did the drones.

Which meant that when I stepped off the ramp, I stepped off into the real thing.

One-sixth. The classic Moon, un-tuned, straight off the regolith, the gravity the rock actually made and no corporation bothering to top it up.

I put my foot down expecting my weight, and my weight wasn’t there.

The step came out wrong; too light, too far, my boot skimming off the ramp and my whole body going up and forward at once, the bag on my shoulder suddenly weighing nothing and swinging me with it, and I got exactly one undignified half-bounce across the concrete before I got my other foot down and caught myself, arms out, sword swinging, in front of a forklift drone that adjusted its path around me without comment.

The Divers off the Diligent loped past me, badges already coming off, and not one of them so much as glanced at the kid rediscovering his own mass by the ramp.

I stood there a second and got my feet under me, and let my body finish learning the new rules.

Then I unclipped the FREIGHT ESCORT (TEMP) badge, looked at my own name printed on it under a job I’d held for one hour and fifty minutes, and put it in my cargo pocket instead of the bin by the door.

I shouldered the bag, which weighed a sixth of what it should have, and I owed Mom a call before I did anything else, so I made it standing there by the ramp with the forklift drones nosing past me.

She picked up before the first ring finished.

“I landed,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m at LunaFreight and I’m about to go check out.”

Her eyes went over me head to toe, hunting for anything the shuttle might have taken off. “You’re standing funny.”

“It’s the gravity. It’s a sixth. Everyone stands funny.”

“Then go stand funny somewhere with your cousin in it.” She wasn’t quite smiling. “Call me when you’re actually with Asti. Not a text. And Dash—”

“Be safe,” I said before she could. “I know.”

“Be safe,” she said anyway, because me saying it first didn’t count, apparently.

The call cut, and I went to find how to get out.

Checkout was past a set of blast doors that had been propped open so long the hinges had rusted into the propped position, down a corridor, and into a hall that was the first thing on the Moon anyone had bothered to make look official.

Two channels. On the left, a switchback line of people off the Diligent and off whatever else had docked that morning, badges out, hardcases on the floor between their boots, the line long enough to have developed its own mythos. On the right, a single channel under a lit sign, one word, gold on black:

VIP.

Nobody was in it.

I looked at the line. I looked at the empty channel. And I thought: I’m Dash Kallum, and this is the Moon, the most corporate rock in the system, and if there is anywhere in existence where that name buys a shorter line, it is thirty meters from where I’m standing.

So I walked the VIP channel.

They clocked it before I’d taken three steps. A Diver near the front of the long line, a big one, hardcase at his feet, watched me go and waited.

Somebody said something low.

Somebody else laughed, that same swallowed laugh I’d heard in the hold. The kid in the yellow hoodie with a sword at his side, strolling into VIP like he’d read the wrong sign, about to get walked back to the end by his ear.

I kept my eyes forward, and I did not hurry, and holding all this at once took more out of me than the walk did.

The officer at the end of the channel wore the gold-and-black of the Alliance itself, not a corporate uniform, the actual colors, and she watched me come the whole way.

“Good morning, sir.” she said, polite. “May I see your VIP credential?”

I shook my head.

I could feel the long line watching the back of my neck, waiting for the part where she pointed me at it.

“I don’t have one,” I said. “But I think I’m in the right place.” I unclipped the FREIGHT ESCORT (TEMP) badge, the flimsy printed thing with my name under a job I’d held for under two hours, and I set it on the reader like it meant something, and I laid my Diver license down beside it. “I’m Kallum.”

I held myself the way I’d watched the twins hold themselves, and I hoped it came across as heir and not as a kid running a bluff on the Alliance.

She glanced at me. One careful pass, the badge to the license to my face.

Then she swiped both.

The reader took its half-second. Whatever came up on her side, she read it, and her posture shifted so slightly I’d have missed it if I hadn’t been staring for exactly that. She lifted both cards and held them back to me across the counter, face-up, presented.

“That checks out,” she said. “Welcome to the Moon, Mr. Kallum.” Still no warmth in it, but a new correctness had come into her voice. “Will you be needing transport to the KES dome?”

I had no idea what the KES dome was. I put it on my ask later list, from someone who wasn’t wearing Alliance gold.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I’ve got my own driver waiting.”

She inclined her head. Beside her, a second officer had already put a hand out toward my bag, and without looking at him she said, “No need. He’s cleared.”

The hand came back as if the bag had turned hot.

I picked it up myself, and I went through.

The door on the far side let me into somewhere that had decided physics was a service tier.

Gravity came back the moment I crossed the threshold, a full g, poured into me between one step and the next, so that my foot landed exactly where I’d sent it for the first time since the ramp.

Someone was paying for that. Someone was burning mana to hold a whole Earth’s worth of weight inside a single room so that the right kind of people never had to feel the Moon under them at all.

The lounge ran on ambient light and expensive edges.

Black stone underfoot, veined with a thread of silver that pulsed slowly toward the far exits as if the floor were breathing. Holo-panels hung in the air without frames, cycling arrivals nobody down in freight would ever rate. A bar at the back glowed from inside its own shelving. The chairs were the good kind, dark and clearly not NullSit.

The bar looked like the first friendly thing I’d seen since the ramp, so I went for it, figuring I’d sit down on somebody else’s mana and work out where the exit was.

“Dash?”

I turned. The call came from the far end of the lounge, past the holo-panels, where the chairs clustered thicker and a man sat in one of them with two helmets on a table in front of him.

He was in a riding suit, matte black leather with seams of light running down the arms and the flanks, the kind that flares brighter the faster you go. He stood as I came over, tall, and put out a hand.

I shook it. Firm, quick, done.

“Duncan,” he said. He had an easy voice, all the enthusiasm the TED clerk had spent a career unlearning. “Boss asked me to run you to the library. She wants you there by eight, and the morning rush through the ring is a nightmare, so we should really get—”

“Eight?” I said. “Asti told me noon.”

Duncan grinned. “Tago time. You’re on standard time now, friend; we run four hours behind Tago up here. Your noon’s our eight.” He picked up the nearer helmet and tucked it under his arm. “Which makes it about seven in the morning, which is why the coffee down there was free. Come on.”

We went out a different way than I’d come in, down a long corridor that curved with the shape of the dome, and about ten steps into it the floor let go of me.

The paid gravity ended at a line in the flooring, a brushed metal strip you’d cross without noticing if your whole body didn’t suddenly find out it weighed a sixth of what it had a second before.

My next step went long and light and skimmed me half off the deck, and Duncan didn’t break stride.

“You’ll get the walk in a minute,” he said. “Everyone off the Earth does the bounce. Lounge people never learn it; they go full-g door to door and never touch the actual Moon.”

“Is this—” I caught the wall, got my feet under me, kept up. “This isn’t too much bother? The car, the pickup, all of it. You could’ve just sent me a route.”

“Bother,” he said it like if I amused him. “The boss is paying, I’m on the clock, and I get to fill my baby’s tank on the company card.” He gave me a sideways look, and something ticked over behind it. “Which is your card, technically? Kallum. So.” He let it hang there, cheerful about it. “You mind?”

I was too out of my tinkerer's basement to catch it the first time. “Eh... fine?” I said.

“Good man.”

The corridor opened into a parking structure that climbed up and up in low-lit tiers, full of cars that don’t get driven so much. A row of Laudys near the lift, waiting with their doors that open. Everything down here was black, or the deep colors that read as black until the light caught them, and everything was quiet.

Duncan walked past all of it and stopped at a bike.

It sat on the concrete, lean, its weight thrown forward over the front wheel as if it were already moving.

It was the same matte black as his suit, the same threads of light dead along the fairing, waiting. Two thin wheels, no engine I could see, a seat built for one and a pillion pad bolted on behind it for exactly this.

It looked fast standing still.

“This is my baby,” Duncan said, and handed me the second helmet. “You mind two-up? It’s the fast way, and the fast way’s the only way I know the traffic.” He was already swinging a leg over. “You’ve got the sword, wear it across your back, not at your side, or you’ll knee it the whole ride.”

I moved the sword to my back and put the helmet on and got on behind him, and the light in the suit and along the fairing came up from white to a live electric blue as the bike woke under us, and he took us down the tiers in long silent low-g swoops that left my stomach somewhere around the tier above.

We came out of the garage onto a road cut along a rise, and the Moon opened up in front of me, and I forgot to be cool about it.

The city fell away down the slope in tiers of light, and past it, filling the whole black sky where the stars should have been, was the Gigadome. It was a horizon with a roof.

A dome of pale blue light stood over the city, rising off the ground somewhere I couldn’t see and arching up and over until it closed on itself, kilometers of it, translucent, the stars showing faint through the crown. Along the edge the light bent and thickened and went bright, the way a soap film goes bright at the rim, and for a second it looked exactly like a shield; a wall of held-back force with a whole city safe behind it.

It wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t. There was nothing there at all, nor field, nor glass, just the beacon’s light thrown up into a dome, and past the last millimeter of it, vacuum. Air on one side and nothing on the other, and only the System’s word holding the line between them.

It just looked like a shield, where the light bent.

“First time up the rise?” Duncan said over his shoulder, the bike idling beneath us.

I used to come to Kallum compound sometimes, but that was straight there and back. Not in the actual moon.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.” He let it roll forward. “It does that to everybody.”