reikah
in
inmyvortex
Fic: Not Quite Paradise [2/?], R.
Title: Not Quite Paradise [2/?; ongoing]
Fandom: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Pairing: Fai/Kurogane/Yuui
Author: Co-write between mikkeneko & reikah
Rating: R
Word count: 6,275 this chapter (10,935 so far)
Notes: "In a future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery. AU, Kurogane/Yuui/Fai."
Part One - Earth: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Part Two - Mars: [8] [9] [10] [11]
← back to chapter one
Part One: Earth
into the great unknown
"Fai," Yuui said carefully, enunciating as slowly and clearly as possible in hopes that his words would get through. "I need you to hold on to me."
They were so close to their destination; so close he could almost taste it, and Yuui wanted to scream. It had been hours since they'd escaped the facility; over an hour since Yuui had finally evaded pursuit and ditched the car with its distinctive military markings into a canal. They'd been on foot since then, and Fai's progress was painfully slow; he limped and staggered in a half-paralyzed crawl when he could move at all, frequently collapsing into a half-catatonic curl. At those times Yuui had had to haul him along by near brute force, and as terrifyingly thin as his brother had become, he never would have managed it if he hadn't been a kinetic. Still, their progress had been agonizingly slow, and Yuui jittered with panic that the authorities would soon find the discarded car and spread out to search the area. They had to get to safety before then, had to.
As soon as they'd stopped moving Fai had collapsed again, arms flung around his shins and face pressed against his knees as he rocked slightly on the dirty grime of the alleyway. Yuui looked up the sheer face of the building above, frustrated panic warring with hope. They were so close - so close, and he could get them the rest of the way, if only…
Yuui crouched next to his brother, bringing his mouth on a level to Fai's ears, and tried again. "Fai, listen to me," he said a little desperately. "We're not safe here. I need you to get up, put your arms around me, and hold on tight. I have to levi -" He stopped, cutting himself off in frustration. Did Fai even understand?
If words couldn't reach his brother, he'd have to try touch. He reached out and took hold of Fai's hands, gently prizing his clenched fingers away from his arms and folding them in his own. "Fai," he whispered, pulling his brother's hand against his cheek and rubbing gently against it. "Fai. Listen to me."
"Yuui," his brother said, his voice high and thin and strained. "My head hurts."
"I know," Yuui said, latching desperately onto the response. "I'm taking us somewhere safe, where your head won't hurt as badly, but you have to hold onto me now, Fai. You have to hold on tight and not let go, okay?"
For a moment Fai didn't respond, and Yuui despaired, but then with spastic, jerky movements Fai unfolded from his tight curl and reached his arms towards his twin. Exhaling in relief, Yuui pulled him close and then spent a few minutes shifting them around, until Fai was standing pressed against his back, arms locked in a death-grip over his shoulders and around his chest.
Then he began to climb the side of the building.
It was an old, pre-spaceflight building of about ninety stories tall, but that was quite tall enough. Only a kinetic could have done it at all, and it wasn't exactly easy for Yuui either - he had strained his talent to the limit today in the raid of the military base, and Fai's weight nearly doubled his own. He was only glad that the walls were steel, not sheer glass like most other skyscrapers, and so there would be no astonished workers peering out of tall plate windows at them.
He'd had training on this sort of thing, in preparation for his role as part of the space peacekeeping forces; but all his prior motion training had assumed the free-fall or low-grav environments of space. Doing this in full gravity was a hellish strain, and his limbs began to shake with fatigue before he was halfway there. Thank god for Fai's clamp-like grip over his torso, since he never could have held all his weight in one arm. But he kept on going, hauling himself grimly one foot higher and then another, all attention focused on the spot in the wall that was his goal.
Windows in ninety-story skyscrapers weren't meant to open, of course. But a building like this ran a lot of heavy machinery, and all that waste heat had to go somewhere. He was already sweating heavily before he pulled himself up over the heavy plastic lip of the heat vent, its engine roaring noisily in the darkness as it blasted them with hot, foul-smelling air. Despite the heat and the smell he took a moment to rest there, gasping for breath, before he resettled Fai's weight against his back and began to crawl along the shaft.
It took some awkward, claustrophobic belly-slithering, but at last he managed to get to a spot in the air ducts above a room. Peering through the cracks he assured himself that it was dark and deserted, and shoved the ceiling panels aside so that he could let them both down into the empty room.
There wasn't much light; it was an interior room with no windows, and Yuui dared not turn on the electric lights lest some building maintenance man notice. But there was enough light coming from the humming, quiescent machinery to see by, and as his eyes adjusted, Yuui was able to take stock of the situation.
The building was a hospital, of course - Yuui had worked here once upon a time, one of the many odd jobs they'd taken before they'd been sent to the academy. He'd done some checking of the schedule and the floor plan before he left for the base, to ensure that this room was still here - not in use or converted to some other purpose - and unoccupied.
No doubt the authorities would check this place, since it was within their search range. But with so many buildings to check, it wasn't likely they would do more than question the 24 hour security guard in the front lobby and check the security cams on the first floor. After all, how could anyone have gotten to an unoccupied storeroom halfway up the building without going through the lobby?
It took some time to persuade Fai to let go of him - he apparently took the instructions to hold tight and don't let go very seriously. At last he managed to get Fai detached, and curled him up on a low stack of piled mattresses. Yuui's stomach rumbled, and he gave a shaky laugh - there was little chance of finding food around here. "I guess I should have picked a supermarket to break into, shouldn't I?" he said. But medical supplies for Fai had been higher priority.
He did manage to find some lamps that wouldn't trigger any alarms, and turned them on. He began to ransack the room, cracking locks off cabinets to find supplies and medication within. Behind him, Fai's fast, labored breathing gradually slowed, and he was finally able to sit up on his own a bit.
"Yuui," Fai said, clearly but plaintively. "My eyes hurt."
"It's just the light, Fai," Yuui assured him, trying to juggle an armful of slippery bottles and bulky cellophane-wrapped packages. "You'll be all right in a oh holy shit!"
As he turned to face Fai the plastic-wrapped bottles went slithering and bouncing everywhere as Yuui stared in horror. Fai was pressing his hands against his face, and blood leaked through his fingers and ran down his cheeks like tears as he rubbed his eyes.
Yuui rushed over and grabbed his hands, pulling them down and away from his face with one hand as his other seized Fai's chin and turned his face into the light. "Don't touch it!" he ordered in a panic. "Fai! What happened? What's wrong?"
"My eyes hurt," Fai whimpered, and as he blinked he squeezed another crimson tear from the corner of his blue eyes to run down along his nose. "They always do… when they always…"
With shaking hands Yuui fumbled for pads of gauze and sterile solution, and began to clean away the blood. At last he found the source of it; discolored flaps of skin covering perfectly round, cleanly punctured circles in the orbit of Fai's eye. There were several of them on each eye; most of them healed over by now, but some still slowly oozing blood. More blood had pooled under the skin, discoloring it and causing the skin around his eye to puff out; in a few days he'd likely have a black eye like he'd been clocked in the face by a baseball.
Yuui took a deep, shaking breath to try to calm himself. He had to be calm, for Fai's sake, he couldn't scream in rage or cry, however much he wanted to. "You'll be all right," he said finally. He held up his fingers in front of Fai's face, two fingers. "You can see all right, can't you? How many fingers?"
"Four billion and twelve and thirty-two point nine five," Fai said and it sounded automatic, like a programmed response. "Two in sector - in sector -" He hid his face against his knees, eyes scrunching shut and squeezing out two final tears of blood. "Yuui, please, don't -"
"Shh, shh. It's all right, I promise I'm not going to do anything bad," Yuui said, and in his heart he was weeping. But he had to be strong for Fai. How could he be? Fai had always been the strong one, the one that Yuui could tuck his arms around and press his face against Fai's shoulder to block out the world. "Look at me, I'm going to clean you up. I'm going to make the pain stop, all right?"
He used some antibiotics and some topical analgesic cream to clean out the wounds, and hunted up some medium-strength painkiller pills. He felt uneasy doing even that - God only knew what drugs those bastards had filled Fai's system with, or how the different medications would react - but he couldn't stand for Fai to be hurting any longer.
Once that was done he checked Fai over the rest of the way. The evidence left behind was small; raw glistening IV tracks on Fai's arms, tiny rings of bruises around his wrists and elbows and knees. There were no broken bones, no severe injuries - no, all the damage done to Fai was on the inside. Yuui was no doctor, but he wasn't a fool - there was only one way that Fai could have picked up wounds like that in the lab.
If you wanted to do surgery on the brain, you had to get through the bone protecting it somehow first. Or instead of making your own holes in the bone, many surgeons preferred to use the ones that were already there; lacroscopic entry through the orbit of the eye was much less damaging and intrusive than cutting open the skull with a hacksaw, no matter how high-tech the drill. Especially if you needed to perform multiple surgeries over an extended period of time.
He felt sick. How many times had they…?
Fai stirred then, his fingertips brushing feather-light over Yuui's wrist, and he looked down to see Fai watching him. His bad eye was already swelling shut. The painkillers he had given Fai weren't surgical quality, but they were potent, and he could see them kicking in as some of the gaunt tension faded from Fai's face.
"I don't want," Fai said, pronouncing each word slowly and carefully, as though he were hammering them into the sentence. "To go. To. Sleep. The colors aren't..."
"There aren't any colors here, Fai," Yuui said gently, peeling his twin's fingers off his arm. "And sleep will be good for you."
"Sleep is good," Fai echoed, then his voice changed. "The changes to brain processing during REM sleep make it a perfect wealth of information." He spoke with an ususual accent, his voice crisp and dictation abnormal even as his eyelids were drooping. Yuui compulsively bent forward and pressed his wrist against Fai's forehead, like they were children checking temperatures again.
"He's not here," he told his twin. "It's okay. I'll be here when you wake up, I promise."
Fai looked at him for a long time, his expression dazed and lost, and then without a word he turned over and lay back on the mattresses.
Yuui straightened up, determined that he'd done the right thing to rescue Fai and get him away from that place. Now he knew that there was no way he could ever let those bastards take Fai back; he had to get them both away from here. He hadn't quite known where to go before - he figured maybe catch a shuttlebus to a different continent, lie low for a bit - but it was clear here was a wider location than he had thought.
But it was also dawning that he was going to have to take the responsibility for keeping them both safe. Yuui realized that a part of him had been hoping, however forlornly, that all he had to do was find Fai and get free and then Fai would take over again, making the plans and the decisions like he always had.
That wasn't going to happen now. Or anytime soon, it looked like. There'd been time since leaving the military base for the main blunt of any tranquilizers or hallucinogens to start to wear off, but Fai wasn't any more coherent now than he had been back in his cell. Whatever was wrong with him was something more subtle, more permanent, and Yuui's stomach dropped like a high-speed elevator as he faced full-on the prospect of trying to hide from the authorities in the company of someone who couldn't even walk unassisted or think clearly.
He picked his way around the hospital storeroom, looking for things that might be useful and trying to come up with some kind of plan.
They'd need money. Money to live on, and to travel, and for medicine and for other things like - like bribes, or things like that. Yuui wasn't sure what kind of job he'd be able to find that paid enough, if Fai wouldn't be able to work. The part-time jobs they'd held as children, while under-the-table enough not to alert the authorities, wouldn't provide nearly enough income.
Of course, he'd been a child then; now he was an adult, and a kinetic to boot. Where could he find a job that called on his special telepathic skills? Most of the jobs for kinetics that he'd heard of were in space, but he couldn't…
Yuui paused midstep, staring off into nothing as his mind raced. Space! If there was anywhere that they'd be able to disappear, to get beyond the reach of the Earth government, where better than another planet entirely? Mars, perhaps - the Lunar colonies were still too close to home. Or maybe a space station even further away. Yuui had never been off-planet themselves, but he'd heard that you could get away with almost anything out there.
He paced around the floor, chewing worriedly at the edge of his fingernail as he tried to figure out this plan. Space was the best plan, for sure. There they could be free of Earth, and he could use his talents to keep them safe. But how to get there? The spaceports were sure to have the tightest security, and Yuui had never even been as far as the Orbit Colonies before, the gargantuan floating metal docks that terminated the Elevators and provided the launching point for the rest of the solar system. Maybe…
Maybe this was a crazy plan. Yuui's first rush of elation faded. He wasn't the bold one, he wasn't clever enough for this. And the thought of space, all that frozen empty voice pressing in around him, made him shudder. Maybe it would be better to try to go to ground somewhere here on Earth. They could travel somewhere far away, lie low, try to scrounge up some money. Maybe Fai would get better…
A low moaning sound startled him out of his reverie, and he turned to see his twin thrashing around on the stack of mattress pads. Fai was whimpering, noises that quickly escalated into a scream, and Yuui rushed to his brother's side as Fai's body convulsed, nearly knocking himself onto the floor.
"No!" he screamed, and Yuui grabbed his shoulders, shaking him to try to bring him awake.
"Fai, it's just a dream!" he said desperately. "It's just a nightmare, wake up!"
"I can't!" Fai gasped, and his eyes flew open, staring right at Yuui but not seeing him. In the dim light the blue color of his eyes were washed out, the irises looking almost opaque. "I can't see them, there's too much, colors, there's lines - I, I can't. Crossing. I can't see anything there's too much noise…"
Confused, Yuui glanced around the room. Aside from the background humming of machinery, it was quiet. "You're all right," he tried, unsure what exactly he was supposed to be reassuring Fai about. "It was just a nightmare. It's not real."
"No it is!" Fai screamed, his voice loud enough to make Yuui wince. He glanced worriedly at the door. Nobody should come in here, but if people started hearing screaming in an abandoned storage closet…?
"It is real, they are! They are but I just can't see them! There's too much… I'm sorry, I'm trying. Please don't… please don't…" Fai's voice ran down in a hiccupping sob, and he sagged against the floor, his hands clenched white around Yuui's arms. "I'm so tired. Just let me rest and then I'll try again, please."
Yuui abandoned words and gathered Fai into his arms, rocking him like a child while he murmured soothing shushing noises. Fai was still crying, choked, exhausted sobs that produced no tears. His limbs were tense as wires, his muscles twitching and jerking in abortive, unconscious movements under Yuui's hands. And Yuui did not know what to do.
Somewhere outside, a siren began to wail.
It didn't mean they'd been found. It probably didn't even have anything to do with them at all. But the sound pushed Yuui over the edge into sheer panic, the state of mind when caution and restraint are cast aside in the desperate struggle for a solution. He cast his gaze wildly around the darkened hospital room, and his eyes fell on the darkened, inert bulk of a triage capsule.
He stilled. No, he thought. I couldn't…
It might work. It might let them get into the spaceport, at least, not two crazy men but one man and a piece of luggage. It would at least get them as far as the spaceport docks, where the security was much higher - for there the people and goods were controlled by rigorous customs and security. And at least it would make him be quiet, Yuui thought, and hated himself for it.
Yuui was no doctor, but the pods were built to be used by amateurs - they were adapted colony coldsleep pods, designed to put people into stasis to await treatment if there's too many injured to treat right away. They were meant to be fast, and easy, and safe. Once he had it powered up and turned on, the glowing interface pad told him what to do.
It took much longer to prep Fai, to dress him in the protective antifreeze gel and coax him into the pod. It was hard to say how much Fai understood of what was happening, but he clung to Yuui's hands as he lay down in the padded interior of the capsule, and his eyes had a fever-bright intensity as he stared up into Yuui's.
"No dreams," Yuui told him, smoothing a strand of bright blond hair down against Fai's temple. "I promise." There shouldn't be, anyway - the hibernation system of the triage capsule put the sleeper into something much deeper than REM sleep. He just hoped there was nothing else that could disturb Fai's slumber.
"You'll be there?" Fai breathes, hands tightening on Yuui's until his grip is painful. "You promise?"
"I promise. I promise," Fai repeated. He squeezed back, and from somewhere dredged up a smile. "It'll be just me."
"You won't… they won't… I don't want to…" Fai's speech was breaking down into incoherency again, and bright tears filled his eyes as he bit his lip in an effort to express himself. But Yuui understood.
"No one else, Fai. I promise." Yuui's mouth is dry, and he had to swallow hard before he could say the next words. "You'll wake up to see me, or - or you won't wake up at all."
He felt cold and hurt and shocked in his belly to say it, but he knew it was true. He'd kill Fai before he let anyone take him into that hell again. But Fai smiled, sweetly, brilliantly, and Yuui realized that Fai wanted that too.
"Thank you," he breathed.
Tears blurred Yuui's eyes now too, and he squeezed them shut and stooped down. His lips found Fai's - rough and uneven, bitter with the tang of blood and the antifreeze gel - and he kissed him one last time before he hit the button that would seal Fai into sleep.
People argued over what event had truly marked the beginning of humankind's domination over space. Some nostalgics pointed as far back as America's manned landing of the moon or even, a little more realistically, the European Union's exploratory post on Mars. But most pragmatic people agreed that these had been mostly dramatic gimmicks; that the colonization of space hadn't really begun until the first manufacturing yard opened on the Lunar surface, and the first automated mining drones began to return from the Belt. Not until people began to built space vehicles in space, rather than fighting against Earth's gravity well to launch them atop humongous rockets, had the dream of space habitation become a reality.
Only then could the large-scale, self-sufficient stations be built; first on the lunar surface, then the immense, floating fortresses balanced on the LaGrange points in Earth and moon orbit. Terraforming bots were constructed and dispatched to Mars, beginning the centuries-long process of taming the cold planet, but humanity was never that patient; Mars began to sprout sealed domes even faster than Luna had.
But the true age of space colonization came not with ships or stations, but with something much closer to earth: the construction of the massive, ambitious space elevators that eliminated the need for costly rocket boosts forever. For the first time large-scale transportation of materials, plants, animals and supplies into orbit were made possible; for the first time heavy cargoes of raw materials from the mining drones could be safely sent back. Not science but trade kicked the solar habitation effort into high gear, followed quickly by crowds of curious space tourists.
And the space elevators made another dream possible, as well. The vast manufacturing yards turned to an even vaster project: immense colony-ships, bound not for Earth's neighbors but for habitable planets discovered in distant solar systems. Within reach at last, the dream of space colonization lured thousands of adventurers from Earth's surface into orbit for barely more than the cost of a plane ticket. Equipped with their own terraformed ecosystems, with armies of robots guarding thousands of souls in deep hibernation, the colony ships set off for the stars.
It was a one-way trip, of course - the interstellar distances were too vast to ever return, too vast even for communication when a light-speed radio signal could take ten years to make the trip. Once the colony ships were out of sight they were gone forever, people on Earth thought, scattered among the stars to make their own destiny with no way of ever finding them again.
Or at least, so people thought: until one day a woman in Greece woke up to realize that she could hear voices in her head from her cousins who had departed for Proxima Centauri years ago.
Humanity had spent the last century bending and breaking nature to their will and whim; it came to quite a shock to them to discover that nature had made its changes on them, as well.
Kurogane walked into the spacer's lounge, a solid glower on his face directed at anyone who dared to glance his way, and his hand hovering suggestively close to the hot katana by his hip. It was hardly necessary - this was Earth space, after all, not out in the wide black where people preyed on the weakest - but it was good to keep up habits.
It was funny, he reflected, how context made all the difference. Here in 'civilized' space there was nothing to fear from the civilians, a meek and petty lot for the most part - it was the cops you had to watch out for, always on the lookout for an opportunity to bust your ass. In the outworlds it was the other way around; you'd get the crazy loners who had been driven to the very fringes of civilization, who'd slit your throat for a handful of yenbucks or shoot you in the back just for wearing a color of shirt they didn't like. By contrast the law enforcement - what there was of it - was usually in the pay of the local station barons. Or, in a handful of rare cases, they were good men genuinely trying to keep some semblance of order in a civilized world, and they wouldn't bother you as long as you didn't rock the boat.
Kurogane had been on both sides of that divide, from time to time.
He preferred the outworlds, of course. Anyone in his line of work would. He didn't normally come this far in-system - close enough to practically buzz Earth's ozone, if he felt like playing chicken with gravity - but he'd gotten an offer for his latest cargo that he couldn't resist. Five hundred grams of high-grade, fresh from the best mines of Titan - and the orbit colonies could pay more, and needed more, than almost anyone else.
Most high-grade fissionable metals were mined in space these days - there was no lack of rocks and metals in the solar system - and mostly used in space, where the demand for energy was huge and there were no handy fossil fuels to waste on it. Despite that the Earth government, greedy as always, held them as some of the most highly-controlled substances in the galaxy. They demanded that all shipments of fissionable materials had to pass through their safety inspection stations - and pay their thirty percent markup tax. Hardly necessary to claim a 'tax' on it when hundreds of grams a year was 'confiscated' by agents as being 'unsafe for human use' - only to turn up a week later heating some rich Earthie's Jacuzzi bathtub!
No, Kurogane had no time to waste on Earth, and no patience for their gluttonous attempt to dominate the solar economy. One hundred percent spacer born - one of the first, his family born and raised in the gigantic Japanese zaibatsu stations that were Mankind's first real extraterrestrial colonies - Earth commanded none of his nostalgia, sympathy, or respect. What was mined in space, used in space, belonged to the spacers, and he wasn't going to pay those greedy Earthers a dime.
Many station businessmen agreed, of course. And that was where people like Kurogane came in.
He had his own ship. That was worth a lot, in today's world. It wasn't a very large ship, just one cylinder around the central core with a crew of three and not much space to spare for on-board cargo. Still, it was a ship, owned free and clear without a debt to anyone, with a drop shuttle for surface landings and half a dozen cargo pods in tow. Even a few kilograms of cargo space could translate to a lot of money, when the cargo was drugs - which Kurogane refused to deal in - or high-grade - which he didn't. And it allowed Kurogane and his two crewmembers to live their lives as they chose.
Still, despite the profit, there was a lot of risk in coming this far in-system. Risk that something would flag him, draw the federal shipping police down on him. Risk every time he dealt with his local contacts, that they would decide the risk was greater than the profit, and turn him in to cover their own asses. Kurogane had needed to play some pretty risky high-velocity tag and shoot with some sharks on his way in with this cargo, and he itched to be out and away.
He reined in his impatience. A successful businessman didn't let vague shadows spook him, and fuel wasn't cheap. He had to take on some kind of cargo to make his next trip worth it, or he'd be bleeding money every kilometer he went.
It was always harder to find cargoes going out of Earth space than coming in. The two biggest exports to the outer colonies were drugs and slaves, both of which Kurogane refused to touch. And anything even remotely organic was hounded by the feds like fucking watchdogs.
Still, there had to be something. He slid into a corner table by the back of the port bar, where he could keep his back to the wall and keep an eye on the door and large plate window. He tapped his order into the pad in the center of the table - showoff, frivolous Earth - and caught the bartender's eye as his order flashed up at the center bar.
Touya nodded at him just slightly, and turned back to the rest of the bar. Touya was one of his best contacts on the spaceports; for all that he lived in Earth's shadow, he had no love for the central government. And in his line of work, he met a lot of people, traveling through on business or pleasure or… for other reasons. If there was anyone here tonight who might have some business for Kurogane, Touya would send them his way.
His drink rose up from the center of the table - gold whiskey with just a splash of tonic - and for a moment Kurogane devoted to it the full attention he deserved. On this, he thought grudgingly, Earth had the advantage; no hydroponic recycle center or greenhouse could turn out alcohol quite like old Earth.
When he looked up again from his glass, Touya was leaning over the bar and talking to a man. Kurogane's eyes widened, then narrowed as he took in just what kind of man. He had 'Earther' written all over him - his clothes, his stance, his bearing - but his skin was as fair as though he'd never seen the sun. He looked awkward and out of place. What would a man like that be doing on the outgoing side of the space docks?
Touya nodded over the man's shoulder in the direction of his corner, and the stranger turned around and stared at his table. His eyes crossed Kurogane's with a jolt that the bigger man felt almost as a physical blow.
"This seat taken?" the stranger asked brightly, and Kurogane took an instant dislike to his cheerful tone. He wasn't a morning person at the best of times, but it wasn't just that; given the tension around his mouth and the wild look in his eyes, the chipper façade grated like a hacksaw on a violin.
If this guy was really a customer, then it wouldn't do to tell him to fuck off. He gave a noncommittal grunt instead; the man plopped down and smiled brilliantly across the table at him.
"What d'you want," he said, after polishing off another swallow of whiskey. He couldn't allow himself to get too drunk but damn, he missed good alcohol in the outworlds.
"My, you're a friendly one, aren't you?" the stranger laughed. Then his smile faded slightly; he put his elbows on the table and laced his hands together, and leaned forward slightly. "I need to transport some… unusual cargo."
"Unusual," Kurogane drawled. Something prompted him to mess with the guy's head a little. "Nothing illegal or anything like that, I hope."
A brief flash of dismay sparked in the man's eyes, but he kept on smiling. "No, of course not," he said after a brief pause. "It just requires some… special handling. I would have a lot of trouble getting it through customs; they don't really have the facilities to handle it. I hoped that you could help me."
"Maybe," Kurogane allowed, letting business push aside his initial irritation with this joker. "I have a ship. It'll cost you, though; specialized cargo runs aren't cheap. You can pay?"
"I have a little money put by," the stranger said. His fingers worked restlessly, dragging through the moisture left on the tabletop and fiddling with a napkin. He turned the flimsy paper around and pushed it across the table towards Kurogane. The smuggler's eyes fell to it; faintly traced lines spelled out 500,000.
That was a hefty price. Kurogane was intrigued despite himself, and even as he braced himself for suspicion, he knew he'd do it. "Where to?" he asked, as he passed his glass over the napkin, smearing the numbers into obscurity.
"Where are you going?" the stranger countered.
Kurogane narrowed a glare at his potential client; what was the man playing at? "Europa," he said at last, naming one of the furthest and most desolate of the Solar colonies, a true backwater town millions of kilometers from anything.
"What a surprise, that's where I'm going too," the man said cheerily.
Kurogane rolled his eyes. Fine; if this idiot wanted to play silly buggers, he was game. "This cargo. What's its dimensions?" he asked.
"Two point five cubic meters by one," his customer replied. "Three hundred kilos, give or take a few."
"How many?"
"Just one," the man said quickly.
One? It didn't sound like much, but in sufficiently expensive cargo, that could mean a lot of profit. "Fine," he said guardedly. "I've got a dozen cargo pods. We can stow -"
"No!" the blond man said hurriedly, and for the first time in this conversation the strain behind his cheery façade flashed through. "No cargo pods. I want it stowed with me, on the ship."
"On-ship?" Kurogane's bullshit alarms began to go off in the back of his head, and he began to rethink this deal. "This isn't a cruise liner. There's hardly room for you to bunk, let alone take a carton of that dimension with you on board."
"It goes with me," the man repeated stubbornly. "Or no deal."
Kurogane stared at him for a long moment, trying to figure out what was going on here. His initial worry, that this weirdo was some sort of sting or plant, was fading; he looked way too agitated and was behaving too strangely for that. But what in the hell else could it be? Half a million yenbucks was a lot of money. "Radioactive?" he said at last.
"Definitely not," the client said firmly. "Just - fragile. I don't trust it out of my sight."
Kurogane broke one of his rules of business, then; despite the unsecured venue he leaned forward until he and the stranger were breathing the same air, and growled softly "Just what the hell is in this carton?"
The man glared back at him, his blue eyes surprisingly icy. "I was assured that you would be discreet and confidential. What's my cargo is none of your business."
"I'm plenty discreet," Kurogane snorted, wondering what the hell Touya had told him. "But I'm not stupid, and I'm not suicidal. Whatever you're mixed up with, it stinks."
"I can find another shipper," the stranger said icily, starting to stand from the table.
"Can you?" Kurogane challenged him.
A silence hovered over the table between them. For a moment his expression was unguarded; painfully vulnerable, dangerously scared. His eyes darted around the room, and Kurogane could almost read his thoughts; who else can I trust? Will I be able to find someone else before it's too late?
Kurogane finished the last of his drink. "Look," he said. "I don't owe anything to Earth, or any Earthie government. Whatever it is, I sure as hell won't report you or turn you in for it. But my ship means my rules. I want to know what I'm getting myself into, or there's no deal."
"I -" The man broke off mid-sentence, and sat down again, staring at the tabletop. He looked at the shining surface and swallowed audibly. "I'll tell you once we're underway," he said in a barely audible voice. "Once it's safe. Not before then."
"All right then," Kurogane said, and felt a last spur of foreboding as he sealed the contract. "It's a deal. Got proof of credit?"
In silence the stranger - his new client - brought out a computer chip and handed it to him. Kurogane raised his eyebrows in surprise as he popped it into his pocket reader to shoot a quick query back to his ship. This guy really was an idiot, or at least painfully naïve; if he'd wanted to Kurogane could have stripped the account of its funds right then and there, before ditching his new passenger in space.
The promised money was there, under an obviously fake name. Kurogane waited for the all-clear to come through, then handed the chip back, unaltered. "All right," he said. "My ship can be ready to leave by 2300 tonight. Meet me by the south lockers with your cargo and we'll get loaded."
A look of undisguised relief flashed over his new passenger's face, and he scrambled to his feet. "I'll be there," he promised.
Kurogane regretfully abandoned the idea of another drink and unfolded from his corner table, nodding to Touya as he started to pick his way through the tabled.
"Ah - don't you want to know my name?" the blond man asked as Kurogane pushed past him.
"Not really," Kurogane tossed over his shoulder as he left the bar.
chapter three →
-tbc
Fandom: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Pairing: Fai/Kurogane/Yuui
Author: Co-write between mikkeneko & reikah
Rating: R
Word count: 6,275 this chapter (10,935 so far)
Notes: "In a future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery. AU, Kurogane/Yuui/Fai."
Part One - Earth: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Part Two - Mars: [8] [9] [10] [11]
← back to chapter one
Part One: Earth
into the great unknown
"Fai," Yuui said carefully, enunciating as slowly and clearly as possible in hopes that his words would get through. "I need you to hold on to me."
They were so close to their destination; so close he could almost taste it, and Yuui wanted to scream. It had been hours since they'd escaped the facility; over an hour since Yuui had finally evaded pursuit and ditched the car with its distinctive military markings into a canal. They'd been on foot since then, and Fai's progress was painfully slow; he limped and staggered in a half-paralyzed crawl when he could move at all, frequently collapsing into a half-catatonic curl. At those times Yuui had had to haul him along by near brute force, and as terrifyingly thin as his brother had become, he never would have managed it if he hadn't been a kinetic. Still, their progress had been agonizingly slow, and Yuui jittered with panic that the authorities would soon find the discarded car and spread out to search the area. They had to get to safety before then, had to.
As soon as they'd stopped moving Fai had collapsed again, arms flung around his shins and face pressed against his knees as he rocked slightly on the dirty grime of the alleyway. Yuui looked up the sheer face of the building above, frustrated panic warring with hope. They were so close - so close, and he could get them the rest of the way, if only…
Yuui crouched next to his brother, bringing his mouth on a level to Fai's ears, and tried again. "Fai, listen to me," he said a little desperately. "We're not safe here. I need you to get up, put your arms around me, and hold on tight. I have to levi -" He stopped, cutting himself off in frustration. Did Fai even understand?
If words couldn't reach his brother, he'd have to try touch. He reached out and took hold of Fai's hands, gently prizing his clenched fingers away from his arms and folding them in his own. "Fai," he whispered, pulling his brother's hand against his cheek and rubbing gently against it. "Fai. Listen to me."
"Yuui," his brother said, his voice high and thin and strained. "My head hurts."
"I know," Yuui said, latching desperately onto the response. "I'm taking us somewhere safe, where your head won't hurt as badly, but you have to hold onto me now, Fai. You have to hold on tight and not let go, okay?"
For a moment Fai didn't respond, and Yuui despaired, but then with spastic, jerky movements Fai unfolded from his tight curl and reached his arms towards his twin. Exhaling in relief, Yuui pulled him close and then spent a few minutes shifting them around, until Fai was standing pressed against his back, arms locked in a death-grip over his shoulders and around his chest.
Then he began to climb the side of the building.
It was an old, pre-spaceflight building of about ninety stories tall, but that was quite tall enough. Only a kinetic could have done it at all, and it wasn't exactly easy for Yuui either - he had strained his talent to the limit today in the raid of the military base, and Fai's weight nearly doubled his own. He was only glad that the walls were steel, not sheer glass like most other skyscrapers, and so there would be no astonished workers peering out of tall plate windows at them.
He'd had training on this sort of thing, in preparation for his role as part of the space peacekeeping forces; but all his prior motion training had assumed the free-fall or low-grav environments of space. Doing this in full gravity was a hellish strain, and his limbs began to shake with fatigue before he was halfway there. Thank god for Fai's clamp-like grip over his torso, since he never could have held all his weight in one arm. But he kept on going, hauling himself grimly one foot higher and then another, all attention focused on the spot in the wall that was his goal.
Windows in ninety-story skyscrapers weren't meant to open, of course. But a building like this ran a lot of heavy machinery, and all that waste heat had to go somewhere. He was already sweating heavily before he pulled himself up over the heavy plastic lip of the heat vent, its engine roaring noisily in the darkness as it blasted them with hot, foul-smelling air. Despite the heat and the smell he took a moment to rest there, gasping for breath, before he resettled Fai's weight against his back and began to crawl along the shaft.
It took some awkward, claustrophobic belly-slithering, but at last he managed to get to a spot in the air ducts above a room. Peering through the cracks he assured himself that it was dark and deserted, and shoved the ceiling panels aside so that he could let them both down into the empty room.
There wasn't much light; it was an interior room with no windows, and Yuui dared not turn on the electric lights lest some building maintenance man notice. But there was enough light coming from the humming, quiescent machinery to see by, and as his eyes adjusted, Yuui was able to take stock of the situation.
The building was a hospital, of course - Yuui had worked here once upon a time, one of the many odd jobs they'd taken before they'd been sent to the academy. He'd done some checking of the schedule and the floor plan before he left for the base, to ensure that this room was still here - not in use or converted to some other purpose - and unoccupied.
No doubt the authorities would check this place, since it was within their search range. But with so many buildings to check, it wasn't likely they would do more than question the 24 hour security guard in the front lobby and check the security cams on the first floor. After all, how could anyone have gotten to an unoccupied storeroom halfway up the building without going through the lobby?
It took some time to persuade Fai to let go of him - he apparently took the instructions to hold tight and don't let go very seriously. At last he managed to get Fai detached, and curled him up on a low stack of piled mattresses. Yuui's stomach rumbled, and he gave a shaky laugh - there was little chance of finding food around here. "I guess I should have picked a supermarket to break into, shouldn't I?" he said. But medical supplies for Fai had been higher priority.
He did manage to find some lamps that wouldn't trigger any alarms, and turned them on. He began to ransack the room, cracking locks off cabinets to find supplies and medication within. Behind him, Fai's fast, labored breathing gradually slowed, and he was finally able to sit up on his own a bit.
"Yuui," Fai said, clearly but plaintively. "My eyes hurt."
"It's just the light, Fai," Yuui assured him, trying to juggle an armful of slippery bottles and bulky cellophane-wrapped packages. "You'll be all right in a oh holy shit!"
As he turned to face Fai the plastic-wrapped bottles went slithering and bouncing everywhere as Yuui stared in horror. Fai was pressing his hands against his face, and blood leaked through his fingers and ran down his cheeks like tears as he rubbed his eyes.
Yuui rushed over and grabbed his hands, pulling them down and away from his face with one hand as his other seized Fai's chin and turned his face into the light. "Don't touch it!" he ordered in a panic. "Fai! What happened? What's wrong?"
"My eyes hurt," Fai whimpered, and as he blinked he squeezed another crimson tear from the corner of his blue eyes to run down along his nose. "They always do… when they always…"
With shaking hands Yuui fumbled for pads of gauze and sterile solution, and began to clean away the blood. At last he found the source of it; discolored flaps of skin covering perfectly round, cleanly punctured circles in the orbit of Fai's eye. There were several of them on each eye; most of them healed over by now, but some still slowly oozing blood. More blood had pooled under the skin, discoloring it and causing the skin around his eye to puff out; in a few days he'd likely have a black eye like he'd been clocked in the face by a baseball.
Yuui took a deep, shaking breath to try to calm himself. He had to be calm, for Fai's sake, he couldn't scream in rage or cry, however much he wanted to. "You'll be all right," he said finally. He held up his fingers in front of Fai's face, two fingers. "You can see all right, can't you? How many fingers?"
"Four billion and twelve and thirty-two point nine five," Fai said and it sounded automatic, like a programmed response. "Two in sector - in sector -" He hid his face against his knees, eyes scrunching shut and squeezing out two final tears of blood. "Yuui, please, don't -"
"Shh, shh. It's all right, I promise I'm not going to do anything bad," Yuui said, and in his heart he was weeping. But he had to be strong for Fai. How could he be? Fai had always been the strong one, the one that Yuui could tuck his arms around and press his face against Fai's shoulder to block out the world. "Look at me, I'm going to clean you up. I'm going to make the pain stop, all right?"
He used some antibiotics and some topical analgesic cream to clean out the wounds, and hunted up some medium-strength painkiller pills. He felt uneasy doing even that - God only knew what drugs those bastards had filled Fai's system with, or how the different medications would react - but he couldn't stand for Fai to be hurting any longer.
Once that was done he checked Fai over the rest of the way. The evidence left behind was small; raw glistening IV tracks on Fai's arms, tiny rings of bruises around his wrists and elbows and knees. There were no broken bones, no severe injuries - no, all the damage done to Fai was on the inside. Yuui was no doctor, but he wasn't a fool - there was only one way that Fai could have picked up wounds like that in the lab.
If you wanted to do surgery on the brain, you had to get through the bone protecting it somehow first. Or instead of making your own holes in the bone, many surgeons preferred to use the ones that were already there; lacroscopic entry through the orbit of the eye was much less damaging and intrusive than cutting open the skull with a hacksaw, no matter how high-tech the drill. Especially if you needed to perform multiple surgeries over an extended period of time.
He felt sick. How many times had they…?
Fai stirred then, his fingertips brushing feather-light over Yuui's wrist, and he looked down to see Fai watching him. His bad eye was already swelling shut. The painkillers he had given Fai weren't surgical quality, but they were potent, and he could see them kicking in as some of the gaunt tension faded from Fai's face.
"I don't want," Fai said, pronouncing each word slowly and carefully, as though he were hammering them into the sentence. "To go. To. Sleep. The colors aren't..."
"There aren't any colors here, Fai," Yuui said gently, peeling his twin's fingers off his arm. "And sleep will be good for you."
"Sleep is good," Fai echoed, then his voice changed. "The changes to brain processing during REM sleep make it a perfect wealth of information." He spoke with an ususual accent, his voice crisp and dictation abnormal even as his eyelids were drooping. Yuui compulsively bent forward and pressed his wrist against Fai's forehead, like they were children checking temperatures again.
"He's not here," he told his twin. "It's okay. I'll be here when you wake up, I promise."
Fai looked at him for a long time, his expression dazed and lost, and then without a word he turned over and lay back on the mattresses.
Yuui straightened up, determined that he'd done the right thing to rescue Fai and get him away from that place. Now he knew that there was no way he could ever let those bastards take Fai back; he had to get them both away from here. He hadn't quite known where to go before - he figured maybe catch a shuttlebus to a different continent, lie low for a bit - but it was clear here was a wider location than he had thought.
But it was also dawning that he was going to have to take the responsibility for keeping them both safe. Yuui realized that a part of him had been hoping, however forlornly, that all he had to do was find Fai and get free and then Fai would take over again, making the plans and the decisions like he always had.
That wasn't going to happen now. Or anytime soon, it looked like. There'd been time since leaving the military base for the main blunt of any tranquilizers or hallucinogens to start to wear off, but Fai wasn't any more coherent now than he had been back in his cell. Whatever was wrong with him was something more subtle, more permanent, and Yuui's stomach dropped like a high-speed elevator as he faced full-on the prospect of trying to hide from the authorities in the company of someone who couldn't even walk unassisted or think clearly.
He picked his way around the hospital storeroom, looking for things that might be useful and trying to come up with some kind of plan.
They'd need money. Money to live on, and to travel, and for medicine and for other things like - like bribes, or things like that. Yuui wasn't sure what kind of job he'd be able to find that paid enough, if Fai wouldn't be able to work. The part-time jobs they'd held as children, while under-the-table enough not to alert the authorities, wouldn't provide nearly enough income.
Of course, he'd been a child then; now he was an adult, and a kinetic to boot. Where could he find a job that called on his special telepathic skills? Most of the jobs for kinetics that he'd heard of were in space, but he couldn't…
Yuui paused midstep, staring off into nothing as his mind raced. Space! If there was anywhere that they'd be able to disappear, to get beyond the reach of the Earth government, where better than another planet entirely? Mars, perhaps - the Lunar colonies were still too close to home. Or maybe a space station even further away. Yuui had never been off-planet themselves, but he'd heard that you could get away with almost anything out there.
He paced around the floor, chewing worriedly at the edge of his fingernail as he tried to figure out this plan. Space was the best plan, for sure. There they could be free of Earth, and he could use his talents to keep them safe. But how to get there? The spaceports were sure to have the tightest security, and Yuui had never even been as far as the Orbit Colonies before, the gargantuan floating metal docks that terminated the Elevators and provided the launching point for the rest of the solar system. Maybe…
Maybe this was a crazy plan. Yuui's first rush of elation faded. He wasn't the bold one, he wasn't clever enough for this. And the thought of space, all that frozen empty voice pressing in around him, made him shudder. Maybe it would be better to try to go to ground somewhere here on Earth. They could travel somewhere far away, lie low, try to scrounge up some money. Maybe Fai would get better…
A low moaning sound startled him out of his reverie, and he turned to see his twin thrashing around on the stack of mattress pads. Fai was whimpering, noises that quickly escalated into a scream, and Yuui rushed to his brother's side as Fai's body convulsed, nearly knocking himself onto the floor.
"No!" he screamed, and Yuui grabbed his shoulders, shaking him to try to bring him awake.
"Fai, it's just a dream!" he said desperately. "It's just a nightmare, wake up!"
"I can't!" Fai gasped, and his eyes flew open, staring right at Yuui but not seeing him. In the dim light the blue color of his eyes were washed out, the irises looking almost opaque. "I can't see them, there's too much, colors, there's lines - I, I can't. Crossing. I can't see anything there's too much noise…"
Confused, Yuui glanced around the room. Aside from the background humming of machinery, it was quiet. "You're all right," he tried, unsure what exactly he was supposed to be reassuring Fai about. "It was just a nightmare. It's not real."
"No it is!" Fai screamed, his voice loud enough to make Yuui wince. He glanced worriedly at the door. Nobody should come in here, but if people started hearing screaming in an abandoned storage closet…?
"It is real, they are! They are but I just can't see them! There's too much… I'm sorry, I'm trying. Please don't… please don't…" Fai's voice ran down in a hiccupping sob, and he sagged against the floor, his hands clenched white around Yuui's arms. "I'm so tired. Just let me rest and then I'll try again, please."
Yuui abandoned words and gathered Fai into his arms, rocking him like a child while he murmured soothing shushing noises. Fai was still crying, choked, exhausted sobs that produced no tears. His limbs were tense as wires, his muscles twitching and jerking in abortive, unconscious movements under Yuui's hands. And Yuui did not know what to do.
Somewhere outside, a siren began to wail.
It didn't mean they'd been found. It probably didn't even have anything to do with them at all. But the sound pushed Yuui over the edge into sheer panic, the state of mind when caution and restraint are cast aside in the desperate struggle for a solution. He cast his gaze wildly around the darkened hospital room, and his eyes fell on the darkened, inert bulk of a triage capsule.
He stilled. No, he thought. I couldn't…
It might work. It might let them get into the spaceport, at least, not two crazy men but one man and a piece of luggage. It would at least get them as far as the spaceport docks, where the security was much higher - for there the people and goods were controlled by rigorous customs and security. And at least it would make him be quiet, Yuui thought, and hated himself for it.
Yuui was no doctor, but the pods were built to be used by amateurs - they were adapted colony coldsleep pods, designed to put people into stasis to await treatment if there's too many injured to treat right away. They were meant to be fast, and easy, and safe. Once he had it powered up and turned on, the glowing interface pad told him what to do.
It took much longer to prep Fai, to dress him in the protective antifreeze gel and coax him into the pod. It was hard to say how much Fai understood of what was happening, but he clung to Yuui's hands as he lay down in the padded interior of the capsule, and his eyes had a fever-bright intensity as he stared up into Yuui's.
"No dreams," Yuui told him, smoothing a strand of bright blond hair down against Fai's temple. "I promise." There shouldn't be, anyway - the hibernation system of the triage capsule put the sleeper into something much deeper than REM sleep. He just hoped there was nothing else that could disturb Fai's slumber.
"You'll be there?" Fai breathes, hands tightening on Yuui's until his grip is painful. "You promise?"
"I promise. I promise," Fai repeated. He squeezed back, and from somewhere dredged up a smile. "It'll be just me."
"You won't… they won't… I don't want to…" Fai's speech was breaking down into incoherency again, and bright tears filled his eyes as he bit his lip in an effort to express himself. But Yuui understood.
"No one else, Fai. I promise." Yuui's mouth is dry, and he had to swallow hard before he could say the next words. "You'll wake up to see me, or - or you won't wake up at all."
He felt cold and hurt and shocked in his belly to say it, but he knew it was true. He'd kill Fai before he let anyone take him into that hell again. But Fai smiled, sweetly, brilliantly, and Yuui realized that Fai wanted that too.
"Thank you," he breathed.
Tears blurred Yuui's eyes now too, and he squeezed them shut and stooped down. His lips found Fai's - rough and uneven, bitter with the tang of blood and the antifreeze gel - and he kissed him one last time before he hit the button that would seal Fai into sleep.
People argued over what event had truly marked the beginning of humankind's domination over space. Some nostalgics pointed as far back as America's manned landing of the moon or even, a little more realistically, the European Union's exploratory post on Mars. But most pragmatic people agreed that these had been mostly dramatic gimmicks; that the colonization of space hadn't really begun until the first manufacturing yard opened on the Lunar surface, and the first automated mining drones began to return from the Belt. Not until people began to built space vehicles in space, rather than fighting against Earth's gravity well to launch them atop humongous rockets, had the dream of space habitation become a reality.
Only then could the large-scale, self-sufficient stations be built; first on the lunar surface, then the immense, floating fortresses balanced on the LaGrange points in Earth and moon orbit. Terraforming bots were constructed and dispatched to Mars, beginning the centuries-long process of taming the cold planet, but humanity was never that patient; Mars began to sprout sealed domes even faster than Luna had.
But the true age of space colonization came not with ships or stations, but with something much closer to earth: the construction of the massive, ambitious space elevators that eliminated the need for costly rocket boosts forever. For the first time large-scale transportation of materials, plants, animals and supplies into orbit were made possible; for the first time heavy cargoes of raw materials from the mining drones could be safely sent back. Not science but trade kicked the solar habitation effort into high gear, followed quickly by crowds of curious space tourists.
And the space elevators made another dream possible, as well. The vast manufacturing yards turned to an even vaster project: immense colony-ships, bound not for Earth's neighbors but for habitable planets discovered in distant solar systems. Within reach at last, the dream of space colonization lured thousands of adventurers from Earth's surface into orbit for barely more than the cost of a plane ticket. Equipped with their own terraformed ecosystems, with armies of robots guarding thousands of souls in deep hibernation, the colony ships set off for the stars.
It was a one-way trip, of course - the interstellar distances were too vast to ever return, too vast even for communication when a light-speed radio signal could take ten years to make the trip. Once the colony ships were out of sight they were gone forever, people on Earth thought, scattered among the stars to make their own destiny with no way of ever finding them again.
Or at least, so people thought: until one day a woman in Greece woke up to realize that she could hear voices in her head from her cousins who had departed for Proxima Centauri years ago.
Humanity had spent the last century bending and breaking nature to their will and whim; it came to quite a shock to them to discover that nature had made its changes on them, as well.
Kurogane walked into the spacer's lounge, a solid glower on his face directed at anyone who dared to glance his way, and his hand hovering suggestively close to the hot katana by his hip. It was hardly necessary - this was Earth space, after all, not out in the wide black where people preyed on the weakest - but it was good to keep up habits.
It was funny, he reflected, how context made all the difference. Here in 'civilized' space there was nothing to fear from the civilians, a meek and petty lot for the most part - it was the cops you had to watch out for, always on the lookout for an opportunity to bust your ass. In the outworlds it was the other way around; you'd get the crazy loners who had been driven to the very fringes of civilization, who'd slit your throat for a handful of yenbucks or shoot you in the back just for wearing a color of shirt they didn't like. By contrast the law enforcement - what there was of it - was usually in the pay of the local station barons. Or, in a handful of rare cases, they were good men genuinely trying to keep some semblance of order in a civilized world, and they wouldn't bother you as long as you didn't rock the boat.
Kurogane had been on both sides of that divide, from time to time.
He preferred the outworlds, of course. Anyone in his line of work would. He didn't normally come this far in-system - close enough to practically buzz Earth's ozone, if he felt like playing chicken with gravity - but he'd gotten an offer for his latest cargo that he couldn't resist. Five hundred grams of high-grade, fresh from the best mines of Titan - and the orbit colonies could pay more, and needed more, than almost anyone else.
Most high-grade fissionable metals were mined in space these days - there was no lack of rocks and metals in the solar system - and mostly used in space, where the demand for energy was huge and there were no handy fossil fuels to waste on it. Despite that the Earth government, greedy as always, held them as some of the most highly-controlled substances in the galaxy. They demanded that all shipments of fissionable materials had to pass through their safety inspection stations - and pay their thirty percent markup tax. Hardly necessary to claim a 'tax' on it when hundreds of grams a year was 'confiscated' by agents as being 'unsafe for human use' - only to turn up a week later heating some rich Earthie's Jacuzzi bathtub!
No, Kurogane had no time to waste on Earth, and no patience for their gluttonous attempt to dominate the solar economy. One hundred percent spacer born - one of the first, his family born and raised in the gigantic Japanese zaibatsu stations that were Mankind's first real extraterrestrial colonies - Earth commanded none of his nostalgia, sympathy, or respect. What was mined in space, used in space, belonged to the spacers, and he wasn't going to pay those greedy Earthers a dime.
Many station businessmen agreed, of course. And that was where people like Kurogane came in.
He had his own ship. That was worth a lot, in today's world. It wasn't a very large ship, just one cylinder around the central core with a crew of three and not much space to spare for on-board cargo. Still, it was a ship, owned free and clear without a debt to anyone, with a drop shuttle for surface landings and half a dozen cargo pods in tow. Even a few kilograms of cargo space could translate to a lot of money, when the cargo was drugs - which Kurogane refused to deal in - or high-grade - which he didn't. And it allowed Kurogane and his two crewmembers to live their lives as they chose.
Still, despite the profit, there was a lot of risk in coming this far in-system. Risk that something would flag him, draw the federal shipping police down on him. Risk every time he dealt with his local contacts, that they would decide the risk was greater than the profit, and turn him in to cover their own asses. Kurogane had needed to play some pretty risky high-velocity tag and shoot with some sharks on his way in with this cargo, and he itched to be out and away.
He reined in his impatience. A successful businessman didn't let vague shadows spook him, and fuel wasn't cheap. He had to take on some kind of cargo to make his next trip worth it, or he'd be bleeding money every kilometer he went.
It was always harder to find cargoes going out of Earth space than coming in. The two biggest exports to the outer colonies were drugs and slaves, both of which Kurogane refused to touch. And anything even remotely organic was hounded by the feds like fucking watchdogs.
Still, there had to be something. He slid into a corner table by the back of the port bar, where he could keep his back to the wall and keep an eye on the door and large plate window. He tapped his order into the pad in the center of the table - showoff, frivolous Earth - and caught the bartender's eye as his order flashed up at the center bar.
Touya nodded at him just slightly, and turned back to the rest of the bar. Touya was one of his best contacts on the spaceports; for all that he lived in Earth's shadow, he had no love for the central government. And in his line of work, he met a lot of people, traveling through on business or pleasure or… for other reasons. If there was anyone here tonight who might have some business for Kurogane, Touya would send them his way.
His drink rose up from the center of the table - gold whiskey with just a splash of tonic - and for a moment Kurogane devoted to it the full attention he deserved. On this, he thought grudgingly, Earth had the advantage; no hydroponic recycle center or greenhouse could turn out alcohol quite like old Earth.
When he looked up again from his glass, Touya was leaning over the bar and talking to a man. Kurogane's eyes widened, then narrowed as he took in just what kind of man. He had 'Earther' written all over him - his clothes, his stance, his bearing - but his skin was as fair as though he'd never seen the sun. He looked awkward and out of place. What would a man like that be doing on the outgoing side of the space docks?
Touya nodded over the man's shoulder in the direction of his corner, and the stranger turned around and stared at his table. His eyes crossed Kurogane's with a jolt that the bigger man felt almost as a physical blow.
"This seat taken?" the stranger asked brightly, and Kurogane took an instant dislike to his cheerful tone. He wasn't a morning person at the best of times, but it wasn't just that; given the tension around his mouth and the wild look in his eyes, the chipper façade grated like a hacksaw on a violin.
If this guy was really a customer, then it wouldn't do to tell him to fuck off. He gave a noncommittal grunt instead; the man plopped down and smiled brilliantly across the table at him.
"What d'you want," he said, after polishing off another swallow of whiskey. He couldn't allow himself to get too drunk but damn, he missed good alcohol in the outworlds.
"My, you're a friendly one, aren't you?" the stranger laughed. Then his smile faded slightly; he put his elbows on the table and laced his hands together, and leaned forward slightly. "I need to transport some… unusual cargo."
"Unusual," Kurogane drawled. Something prompted him to mess with the guy's head a little. "Nothing illegal or anything like that, I hope."
A brief flash of dismay sparked in the man's eyes, but he kept on smiling. "No, of course not," he said after a brief pause. "It just requires some… special handling. I would have a lot of trouble getting it through customs; they don't really have the facilities to handle it. I hoped that you could help me."
"Maybe," Kurogane allowed, letting business push aside his initial irritation with this joker. "I have a ship. It'll cost you, though; specialized cargo runs aren't cheap. You can pay?"
"I have a little money put by," the stranger said. His fingers worked restlessly, dragging through the moisture left on the tabletop and fiddling with a napkin. He turned the flimsy paper around and pushed it across the table towards Kurogane. The smuggler's eyes fell to it; faintly traced lines spelled out 500,000.
That was a hefty price. Kurogane was intrigued despite himself, and even as he braced himself for suspicion, he knew he'd do it. "Where to?" he asked, as he passed his glass over the napkin, smearing the numbers into obscurity.
"Where are you going?" the stranger countered.
Kurogane narrowed a glare at his potential client; what was the man playing at? "Europa," he said at last, naming one of the furthest and most desolate of the Solar colonies, a true backwater town millions of kilometers from anything.
"What a surprise, that's where I'm going too," the man said cheerily.
Kurogane rolled his eyes. Fine; if this idiot wanted to play silly buggers, he was game. "This cargo. What's its dimensions?" he asked.
"Two point five cubic meters by one," his customer replied. "Three hundred kilos, give or take a few."
"How many?"
"Just one," the man said quickly.
One? It didn't sound like much, but in sufficiently expensive cargo, that could mean a lot of profit. "Fine," he said guardedly. "I've got a dozen cargo pods. We can stow -"
"No!" the blond man said hurriedly, and for the first time in this conversation the strain behind his cheery façade flashed through. "No cargo pods. I want it stowed with me, on the ship."
"On-ship?" Kurogane's bullshit alarms began to go off in the back of his head, and he began to rethink this deal. "This isn't a cruise liner. There's hardly room for you to bunk, let alone take a carton of that dimension with you on board."
"It goes with me," the man repeated stubbornly. "Or no deal."
Kurogane stared at him for a long moment, trying to figure out what was going on here. His initial worry, that this weirdo was some sort of sting or plant, was fading; he looked way too agitated and was behaving too strangely for that. But what in the hell else could it be? Half a million yenbucks was a lot of money. "Radioactive?" he said at last.
"Definitely not," the client said firmly. "Just - fragile. I don't trust it out of my sight."
Kurogane broke one of his rules of business, then; despite the unsecured venue he leaned forward until he and the stranger were breathing the same air, and growled softly "Just what the hell is in this carton?"
The man glared back at him, his blue eyes surprisingly icy. "I was assured that you would be discreet and confidential. What's my cargo is none of your business."
"I'm plenty discreet," Kurogane snorted, wondering what the hell Touya had told him. "But I'm not stupid, and I'm not suicidal. Whatever you're mixed up with, it stinks."
"I can find another shipper," the stranger said icily, starting to stand from the table.
"Can you?" Kurogane challenged him.
A silence hovered over the table between them. For a moment his expression was unguarded; painfully vulnerable, dangerously scared. His eyes darted around the room, and Kurogane could almost read his thoughts; who else can I trust? Will I be able to find someone else before it's too late?
Kurogane finished the last of his drink. "Look," he said. "I don't owe anything to Earth, or any Earthie government. Whatever it is, I sure as hell won't report you or turn you in for it. But my ship means my rules. I want to know what I'm getting myself into, or there's no deal."
"I -" The man broke off mid-sentence, and sat down again, staring at the tabletop. He looked at the shining surface and swallowed audibly. "I'll tell you once we're underway," he said in a barely audible voice. "Once it's safe. Not before then."
"All right then," Kurogane said, and felt a last spur of foreboding as he sealed the contract. "It's a deal. Got proof of credit?"
In silence the stranger - his new client - brought out a computer chip and handed it to him. Kurogane raised his eyebrows in surprise as he popped it into his pocket reader to shoot a quick query back to his ship. This guy really was an idiot, or at least painfully naïve; if he'd wanted to Kurogane could have stripped the account of its funds right then and there, before ditching his new passenger in space.
The promised money was there, under an obviously fake name. Kurogane waited for the all-clear to come through, then handed the chip back, unaltered. "All right," he said. "My ship can be ready to leave by 2300 tonight. Meet me by the south lockers with your cargo and we'll get loaded."
A look of undisguised relief flashed over his new passenger's face, and he scrambled to his feet. "I'll be there," he promised.
Kurogane regretfully abandoned the idea of another drink and unfolded from his corner table, nodding to Touya as he started to pick his way through the tabled.
"Ah - don't you want to know my name?" the blond man asked as Kurogane pushed past him.
"Not really," Kurogane tossed over his shoulder as he left the bar.
chapter three →
-tbc