“Are those…gravity hoods? I didn’t realize they’d already begun implementing…” Howard marveled right alongside Kalus.
“They didn’t - not until right before Demi picked us up to join the Dogs of War,” Kalus told him. For once, the slightest ounce of sarcasm was absent from his voice. In the face of such an innovation, even he was stricken with unconcealable wonder. “Ring 3 is almost completely podless. I went out on a few on-foot expeditions myself. It’s…odd. They say in another year, they’ll have the first terradome around the Rings. We won’t even need survival suits to walk out on them.”
Kalus and the others stole glances as they descended in Lilia’s wake. Twenty, maybe thirty people could be seen, just from that particular stairwell. They crossed industrial helix-forged bridges with twice the integrity of even those on Neptune, between massive glaciers and boulders caught in the fringe of Saturn’s orbit. As the name implied, half-dome overhangs on thick pillars kept the survival-suited miners beneath them grounded to the deposits. The high-roofed gravity hoods stretched all the way around Ring 3. The Dogs bypassed the fork to exit the stairs onto it. Unlike the previous two Rings, the exit was connected to an airlock suit-up station for miners entering or exiting the unprotected vacuum outside.
“They say…they’ll be able to pay miners more, now they don’t have to pay for as much pod fuel,” Kalus mentioned.
“You seem to know quite a bit about it,” Sophia mused. Her usual teasing edge was oddly dulled.
“Well…thieving might have been my primary contribution to our living, but…it wasn’t the occupation I reported to the WCC’s tax service.” Kalus dared to let a bit of authentic emotion poke through. Bitterness. Sophia’s eyes opened wide with surprise. Surprise that so dubious a man knew anything about honest work. Surprise that the government she enforced would still tax the income of a man who stole to eat.
“You… How long did you work the mines?” Sophia asked. She chased away the chill it gave her to ask by rubbing the outside of her arm. Kalus opened his mouth to answer, but a troubling thought left him without an exact answer. It painted his face with the sudden stress of shock. He couldn’t remember.
“Lil… When did mom pass?”
“Sixteen years ago,” Lilia reminded him. She had been old enough to remember a little more clearly, with her five-year lead on her brother in age.
“Sixteen years,” Kalus told Sophia. She turned away to cover her mouth, so she wouldn’t embarrass them or herself with a gasp. Orphans at eleven and six. Miners at twelve and seven. Commander and Arms Master at twenty-seven and twenty-two.
“Well, this is where we part ways,” Lilia announced. She turned back to the other Dogs as woman none of them but her brother recognized. Her dastardly grin was nothing appropriate for the Commander of a WCC Warbringer. It was, however, just right for a scrapper pilot, returning home to cash in some long-awaited favors.
“Ring 2 is mostly mining too, but it also has one of the best bars on Saturn. In the galaxy, as far as my experience goes,” Kalus announced, “It’s a good place for us to pass the time. Lilia’s right. Her old crew won’t take kindly to five suits showing up, asking for parts.”
“Which reminds me,” Lilia muttered. She slipped her arms out of her jacket and tossed it to her brother. She entwined her fingers in her hair to give it a good rustle. She shook herself into a new, hardier image until the parting between her two wings of hair completely vanished. Even Captain Demi’s eyebrows shot up when she popped the top two buttons of her collared shirt wide open. A previously hidden abundance of cleavage bounced a breath of relieved freedom. Lilia completed the transformation with a swing of her newly roughed-up hair back behind her shoulders. “Howard, give your jacket to Kalus too. I need you to tell me what parts we need.” Howard stood frozen, shoulders slumped, eyes wide.
“Hey,” Kalus rocked him back to life with a hard slap between the shoulders. Howard almost toppled right over, “Mind on the mission, off my sister.”
“O-o-of course, Arms Master Kal-”
“For God’s sake!” Lilia finally burst. She grasped Howard by both sides of his collar to hoist him up out of his hopeless stumble. “You don’t have to call him that, Howard. He’s just being a jackass. Kalus will do just fine.” She stood him up, took his jacket off to toss to Kalus and smiled into his bewildered, flushed face.
“Ye-yes ma’am,” Howard stuttered as Lilia ran hands through his hair. A few seconds of ruffling and patting later, Lilia had transformed the researcher into someone that might have just clocked out of a shift in the rings.
“Don’t you start with me now, too. Just Lilia. Understand?” asked the Commander.
“Understood.”
“Poor bastard,” Sophia muttered, shaking her head. Lilia grabbed Howard by his bewildered shoulder and pulled him along down the stairs to Saturn’s innermost man-made Ring. Kalus watched them descend, stair for stair until the tops of both their heads had vanished below the next story. He hadn’t detected an ounce of human desire from their research specialist until now. And toward his sister, of all people.
“Alright,” Kalus snapped abruptly out of it, “Let’s get you guys somewhere we can finally have a goddamn drink. They call it Gourdstock because they supposedly store their liquor in barrels made from recycled gourds. Honestly, I think they just spike it with jet fuel.”
Much like Kalus, Lilia and her old crew hadn’t reported their biggest source of income to the WCC. She knew her only chance of finding them at this hour was at the cover job she shared with them until only months ago. She led Howard, sometimes by the arm when he fell behind, out into the enclosed steel hallways of Ring 1. The place was put together much like Ring 5, only without any of the storefronts or flowers. In their place were deep caverns carved in the rock by years of cutting and chipping away with Chrysum tools. Lilia’s own hands had dug out more than one. She paced the endless central hall with Howard close in tow and a debonair swagger. She glanced down each branching cavern as they passed it, until she finally found them. Lilia took loud, hard steps into the cave, hands on her hips. She tapped her foot until one of the unsuspecting miners finally looked up from the outcrop he sliced away.
“Of all the dirt-smeared faces I thought I’d next see in hell,” the man grumbled. Howard tensed up as the man wobbled up from his bad knees. Then the man cracked a wide, white smile that burned through the soot in his beard.
“How do you know you’re not there already?” Lilia countered as she paced into the cave. “Big rock of Chrysum drops on top of your head? They’d just shovel right over you and the next thing you’d see is me.” The filthy, bearded man limped over to Lilia and hefted up an arm of twisted, gnarly scars to clasp with Lilia’s. “Deegan. It’s good to see you.”
“The prodigal daughter returns?” Another voice, a woman’s, had come out from the rock behind Deegan. “Didn’t think we’d see you back this way after you left in your golden chariot. Things didn’t work out?”
“Not…quite the way I thought they would. Our ship took some damage. I’m here to broker a deal,” Lilia told the woman. She stepped aside, to let Howard in on the conversation. He, however, obeyed his first instinct as Lilia’s shadow to step right back behind her. She had to grab Howard by his shoulders and move him in front of her to introduce him. “This is Howard. Howard, this is Deegan and Sylvia. Hey… Where’s Digger?” At the sound of the missing fourth member of their crew, her old friends were suddenly unable to look Lilia in the eye. “What?”
“He, ah… He’s not doing so well these days. Not even Camilla can patch a hole in a lung… Probably up to his eyeballs in debt by now, in some clinic on Mars,” Deegan told his old pilot. Lilia’s fingers started to fidget at the thought of it. The image she’d held in her head of the three, gritting their teeth through the day because they still had each other, vanished in a puff of smoke.
“The fumes…finally got to him, huh?” Lilia muttered. He had been hacking more than usual, right before she left. Then it struck her - Digger was the only one besides her who could fly their ship. “Does this mean…you haven’t been scrapping?”
“No, we have. Got ourselves a new fly girl from Ring 5,” Sylvia told her. She stood in a wide-hipped stance, arms crossed tight over her dusty chest. Lilia squinted at her suspiciously defensive stance.
“Well…in that case, I’ve got a deal for you. Howard, tell them what parts we need,” she nudged from him to her old crew. Howard tried in vain to clear his throat several times, before finally continuing with a scratch of nervous mucus.