The Belter's Story (BRIGAND) (2 page)

"This isn’t like that at all. It has a huge opening and these amazing rocks. I wanted to show you. Not Dad."

"You mean, Sardar," I interjected.

"Whatever." Jase waved off my correction. "It’s going to be great. I think it’s something
new
."

I smiled despite myself. Jase loved anything new, anything different. It was a frustration and a delight.

We walked in easy silence as we picked our way deeper into the rille. Far above us, the whisper thin atmosphere of Europa twisted and glowed in the sleet of fast moving ions that whirled around Jupiter. Up there was frozen death and ravaged DNA. But down here, there was life and even beauty.

As we approached our destination, the ice beneath us bucked and tiny cracks spun through the wall to our left. Nothing major. Just part of the constant flux of Europa's crust. But we knew, at least I knew, that it meant we needed to be on our guard. The ice could be fickle.

Jase saw me pause. "The quakes happen a lot around here. I noticed that before, when I found the cave."

He was the only one who ever ventured far from our hab. It’s not that we were forbidden per se, but none of us saw the use in it. We had all we needed, the mines, our habitats. All together. No need to look beyond. But Jase was always different.

"You’re not going to believe the colors" He continued, as the quake shook itself out and the ice settled.

"Here it is!" he cried.

Jase stopped in front of a narrow vertical crevice that slashed diagonally across the face of the ice cliff we'd been following. The opening would accommodate him easily enough but my bulkier suit was going to have trouble fitting through the gap.

"Not closed in huh?" I smiled at him and he grinned big, pleased at my grudging display of humor.

"Come on inside." He waved me forward more as he wriggled into the opening.

As I followed, my utility harness got hung on some unseen protrusion and I couldn't move forward without releasing it.

"Just leave it. It’s not like anyone's around to take it."

The harness, and the tools it carried were my apprenticeship gift from Sardar. I wasn't just a kid helping out any more. I was a miner and, when I'd learned the trade, I'd become a journeyman, qualified to work in the deepest rifts, where the richest seams lay. I couldn't wait to go deep.

I wasn't thrilled about leaving my new tools just lying out here in the rille, especially my cutter — a fusion-powered device that every hard-scrabble Belt miner knew how to use. It could rip through almost anything. But he was right. There wasn't anyone in this whole sector who wasn't family or very nearly so.

Su was hovering just outside the opening. "You watch out for this, okay."

I then turned and wedged my way after Jase, further into the cave.

The cleft narrowed more as we progressed. I didn’t mind at all, but I suspected Jase found it uncomfortable. He didn't seem to do well in tight spaces like this.

"Why are we doing this? How did you even find this place?"

"I wanted you to see them. The rocks I mean."

We slid around a shallow curve in the crevice and had to lean back, at an awkward angle, to fit our bodies through the narrow opening. And then we were through.

The cleft opened into a huge space, a gigantic void in the ice. My mouth dropped open in wonder as I took in the sheer vastness of the place. The far wall had to be a good kilometer away. Above us, slabs of ice leaned together into a vault that extended almost half that far.

And, everywhere, there were nodules of eruopine. Trillions of them. Gigatons. I was looking at more of the stuff than all the Belt miners in all the generations since we first came to Europa had gathered. This was so far beyond the mother lode there wasn't even a word for it.

"What. Is. This?" I breathed.

Jase smiled at my obvious amazement. "Told ya it was awesome."

"We have to go tell Sardar right now."

"But I wanted you to see. Isn’t it beautiful?"

"Yeah, Jase. It’s um, pretty. But do you know how much wealth we’re standing on right now? Do you have any idea?"

Jase frowned and lowered his white blonde head. "We can’t tell anyone."

"What?"

"You can’t tell," He pleaded. "I wanted to show this to
you
. Because it's beautiful. Not so they can dig it up. So they can destroy it. That's all we do."

Something heaved under the violet-colored mounds. Something big.

Jase was standing in front of me. He couldn't see what was happening, but he saw my face.

"Crom, what's wrong?"

My voice cracked, swinging into falsetto as my throat clamped down on my fear. In that moment, everything changed. In that moment I knew. "Behind you!"

I was too late.

The mountain of europine under Jase's feet lurched upward and burst open, revealing an icedigger the size of a small cargo lifter. Jase turned his head and started to say something, but he was silenced by the impact of the thing's front pair of anguipods.

Meter long pincers, glowing hot pink and indigo, snatched Jase by his legs and yanked him upward. His voice started cutting in and out. His comm must have been damaged, but I could hear, "What? No!" and then an eerily rising note, like a scream, but thinner. His suit was depressurizing.

I didn't know what else to do, so I grabbed his gloved hands and pulled, leaning my weight against the monster's grasp. Under my feet were thousands of little europine spheres, like ball bearings. My boots skidded over them and I fell, still clutching Jase's hands, still jamming my feet against anything that would give me leverage. We pawed at each other, trying for a grip we couldn't quite find.

Jase's suit kicked into emergency mode and I could see a faint glow inside his helmet as the backup somashell engaged. Its millimeter thick deflection field would keep his body pressurized for more than long enough to get him to safety if I could just pull him loose. I started to reach for my cutter and then remembered — it was outside, with the rest of my kit.

The edges of my boot soles snagged on some hidden crack in the ice and, for a moment, I had leverage. I lunged, hooking my hands under his armpits and then thrusting with my legs, pulling with every erg I could muster while Jase's screams strobed through his dying comm.

And then he came free.

I tumbled backward with Jase clutched to my chest, slamming flat on my back as the digger disappeared beneath the europine mountain.

"Don… ve… me, Crom."

I scrabbled backwards with Jase's limp form on top of me, thrusting with my legs, shoving myself over broken ice and scattered purple spheres.

"Here, Jase. I got you." I rolled him off of me and sat up. Then I looked down.

Below Jase's hips there was nothing but the pale shimmer of the somashell, sealing the hole where the bottom half of his suit used to be. White bone and pink flesh were awash in dark red blood, all held neatly in place by the somashell's field.

With no warning at all, my stomach lurched and I vomited into my helmet, the stench of bile mixing with the odors of sweat and fear. The reek of it stung my eyes and my stomach clenched again. My mouth filled with saliva, but I clamped my jaw shut and swallowed. Jase's external monitor said he was still alive and horror was a luxury neither one of us could afford.

Adrenaline flooded my bloodstream, shutting down everything more complicated than simple instinct. I grabbed Jase's shoulders and scooted backwards, dragging him toward the open crevice. By the time we reached the crack in the ice wall, Jase's monitor was flashing blue. Imminent arrest. He was dying.

I knew the somashell would have slowed most of his blood loss by now. But shock was killing him. His heart was threatening to stop. I knew that, if I was clever enough, I might be able to use Su to cobble something together, something that might keep him going long enough to get to help. I told her I needed insulated wire, which she spooled through her extruder. I quickly stripped off a length and wound it around the shaft of a grip-spike. Then I repeated the process with a second spike.

I knew Su's anatomy better than my own and I popped open her intake port, looking for the ionizer nodes that she used to break down the raw materials I fed her. Very high voltage. Very low current. Exactly what I needed. I was attaching the second wire when Jase's monitor switched over to steady violet. His heart had given up.

Even in an autodoc, Jase's situation wouldn't have been very good. With nobody but his brother and a fixbot to help him, he never had much of a chance. But I had to try. I jammed the spikes through his suit, into his chest, bracketing where I thought his heart should be. Then I glanced at Su and said, "Do it. Now."

Jase stiffened and convulsed. His monitor flashed blue and his somashell flickered. Then it went dark. We were too late. Jase was gone.

I sat for a long moment, staring at the face of my twin brother. He looked serene, as if he was resting, as if, with a simple shake, I could rouse him and things would be the way they had been. Jase would sit up and we would go home.

Slowly, a lavender glow crept out of Su and down the wires that still connected her to him. It pulsed and little waves of brightness swept gently from Jase up to Su as she hovered over him. It was ethereal and hypnotic, that quiet peristalsis.

Long seconds passed before I let myself admit what she was doing. I'd known for a long time that there was something about our bots. About europine. I'd fed nodules into my little fixbot. She'd broken them down. Separating. Analyzing. And she'd learned something. A thing I didn't understand.

But I knew what she was doing because I'd seen it before. She was taking something from Jase.

Su was feeding.

Jase was dead. I knew that. I knew, but I couldn’t make myself give him up. Even as my quads and hamstrings burned with the weight of him and my shoulder blades sprayed agony down my back, I carried him the whole way. His once joyful form was cold, stiff and blue by the time I stumbled home.

Sardar bowed his head and said something that I didn’t understand. Madera sat and folded her arms over her face. The whole community acknowledged his loss. We mourned. He was reclaimed. We went back into the ice. And that was the end of my twin brother Jase.

Except it wasn't.

I'd been spending most of my time in isolation and nobody seemed inclined to interfere.  Su never left my side. I sat silent for days as she muttered and whirred around me. On the third night I finally snapped. The shock of my brother's death had given way to anger — at myself, at everything. Like an arc seeking ground, my rage flew at Su. I grabbed my cutter, determined to chop her into radioactive rubble, but she skittered back from my grasp, hovering at eye level.

And then she spoke.

Crom, It’s Jase. It’s us.

I dropped the cutter, raising my hands to my ears in a reflexive reaction.

Crom, don’t do it. We're in here. We don't know how, but we are.

Every Belter had heard about this — about miners going insane and conversing with their bots way down in the deep, but this was different. This wasn’t Su.

It was Jase. Or at least it sounded like him.

I rubbed my eyes and drew my hands down over my face. This wasn’t how the experiment, my experiment, with Su was supposed to go. "No, no, no, no." I mumbled. There was something about the europine. And the bots. Some kind of connection. Awareness maybe. Communication. But not this.

Jase/Su answered in Jase's voice,
Yes, it worked. You never told, but we understand now — a little. You knew Su saw something in the rocks. The colors. You wanted her to pull them apart. To show you what they are. You thought the diggers were eating… no that's not right… taking from them. You were close, but you didn't see the rest. The diggers. They're… we don't have the words. The body? That's not quite it. The others. They see. They know. They tell. And the bots… they hear. They don't comprehend, but they listen. You already know that.

I stared wide eyed at the little fixbot. Of course Jase knew. Su knew so now so did Jase. The europine had changed her, strengthened whatever it was that drew her so unfailingly to the clusters in the ice.

"You keep saying, 'we'. Are you Jase?"

We don't know, Crom. It's not like that. We are Jase and Su and… more. We don't know how to say it.

"More? You mean the europine? What does it do?" I already knew part of the answer. I'd known what Su was doing when I tried to save Jase, because she'd done it to me. More than once.

It didn't hurt, although if I let it go on too long, it left me tired, like I'd worked a double shift in the deep. It gave me something, a perfect awareness, as if I was seeing the world around me for the very first time. It was the most complete I had ever felt and, despite the fatigue, despite the fact that I seemed to have aged years in months, I had come to crave it.

We see. And you see with us. But we take — to keep the other alive. It's the way. We take, but not too much. And we give. We share. We need you, Crom.

I knew what to do. I closed my eyes and held out my arm. Su settled gently on my wrist, resting her extensible against my skin. A moment of pressure and then a flood of perception. My senses multiplied a thousand times. I could feel the pulse of my own blood in every capillary. I could smell the drift of organic molecules and skin flakes wafting gently from my body. I saw the almost imperceptible glow that surrounded every living thing. My hands shimmered with it.

So did Su, but her colors were different, brighter, more alive. She wasn't just a bot. She had become a new thing, part bot, part Jase, part something else altogether — a thing that needed. That was its nature. It pulled. It took something that had to do with the glow. My glow. Like any living thing, it consumed and was sustained.

I wouldn't tell. I couldn't. Even if the other miners believed that, somehow, Jase had become my little fixbot, then what? They would take him. And I would lose my new enlightenment, this symbiosis that, when I gave myself, opened me to things beyond all imagining.