“They’re damned low,” I observed. “They’re coming in for a landing. But the only thing over that way is Dave’s farm…and his neighbor, that Hellnick guy.”
“Klaus Hellnick,” she filled in the details. “We met him once in town.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding as I recalled the man. “Weird, shifty-looking bastard. Lives out there all alone, not even any hired hands.”
“His wife and kids died in the war,” she chided me, smacking me lightly on the bicep.
“Sorry.” I frowned, peering at her in the moonlight. “How do you know that?”
“Jed and Riley told me. You know, the couple who run the fabricator shop on Main Street.”
“Sucks about his family,” I allowed. “But he’s still shifty. And I still wonder why there’s a damned shuttle landing on his property in the middle of the night.”
“He probably had something delivered from out-system,” she reasoned. “Maybe even a new harvester.” She put an acerbic edge into the words and I flinched. “Space crews don’t give a shit if it’s the middle of the night local time. The workday on a ship is whenever they need to work.”
I didn’t want to be quite as reasonable as her, but I shrugged.
“We’re ignoring the elephant in the room, though, aren’t we?” she asked, putting an arm around my shoulder, pressing me into a hug. “You’re still having the nightmares. What was it this time?”
I thought about telling her I didn’t remember, but there was no reason to lie. Not to Vicky.
“Deltaville again. The mecha.”
She sighed, resting her head on my shoulder.
“At least it wasn’t Delp this time.”
There was nothing to say to that. I’d seen poor Vince Delp’s face in my nightmares more times than I could count.
“Sorry I woke you up,” I told her, turning, putting my arms around her.
“It’s okay,” she said. “The shuttle would have done it if you hadn’t first.”
I kissed her, suddenly very conscious of how good she looked in the light of the dual moons, in just a white T-shirt, very aware of the warmth of her body against mine.
“No use letting the opportunity go to waste,” I said, arching an eyebrow, pulling her back towards the bed.
“Cam,” she giggled, pushing against my chest, “we have to be up in like three hours!”
“Who cares?” I insisted, falling backwards onto the mattress, and bringing her down with me. “We’re taking the day off tomorrow, having some fun. Might as well start now.”
She offered a token scowl of disapproval, but it quickly turned into something more lascivious, and we both tactfully ignored the real truth of the matter. I didn’t want to go back to sleep.
“I don’t remember Gamma Junction ever being this crowded before,” Clines grumbled, shaking his head as he stared around.
I couldn’t disagree. Gamma Junction wasn’t a city, was barely a town. Originating as a pair of buildfoam storage domes hurriedly thrown up by the Corporate Council to stow the supplies they’d been commissioned by the Commonwealth government to drop down for the colonists, it had grown like a crystal in a growth matrix as some of the newer settlers had decided they didn’t want to be farmers. Instead, they’d built shops and bars and restaurants, all clustered around the warehouses, hugging the landing zone, turning it into what we laughingly referred to now as a spaceport. There was even a hotel now, if you can call a buildfoam half-shell with a dozen rooms a hotel. It catered to spacer crews who wanted to sleep somewhere besides their ships for the night, and we almost never had more than one ship in orbit at a time, no more than one shuttle load of strangers at a time.
Until today. I’d noticed the crowd first from the air, flying in on the hopper taxi. The ducted-fan hovercraft ran a regular run three times daily from two different pickups at the junctions of the dirt roads running out to the farmsteads, and the three of us had caught the first flight into town. Looking down from the window seat, I’d just assumed it had to be some Settlers’ Association meeting I hadn’t seen on the schedule, but now, walking through the open-air shops and kiosks, I counted at least two dozen people I’d never seen before, men and women who sure as hell weren’t farmers or shop-keepers. They might have been spacers, but if they were, they weren’t from any Corporate crew, not the way they were dressed. Corporate Council freighter crews didn’t generally wear vat-grown leathers and fragments of old military fatigues, nor did they allow the sort of holographic facial tattoos and bare cybernetics many of these people sported.
And that’s not even mentioning the guns.
Guns were common on the frontier, of course. We hunted the rock dragons with them and there being no law enforcement to speak of on Hausos, everyone kept a rifle loaded and ready in their rover when they were out in the fields. But I hadn’t seen anyone openly carrying a sidearm on their hip since I’d left the military. It wasn’t something anyone thought to do, maybe because there just weren’t that many of us and we hadn’t been on the world long enough for crime to become a problem.
“Independent spacer crews usually carry guns out on frontier worlds like this one,” Vicky told me when I brought it up. “They don’t know there’s no crime. For all they know, we could have gangs of people who hijack shuttles every time they touch down.”
I eyed her doubtfully.
“And how would you know any more about independent spacer crews than I would?” I wondered.
“I follow the news.” She sniffed as if the question was insulting.
“You saw it in a movie, didn’t you?” Clines said, grinning.
“Maybe,” she admitted. “Come on, let’s get to the fabricator shop before we wind up waiting in a line.”
The strangers barely spared us a look, except the occasional leer and snicker as they paused at one kiosk or another, pawing through the locally-produced tools and hand-sewn clothes with snorts of disdain. They couldn’t have been more obvious about sneering at us local rubes if they’d hung a sign around their necks, but I suppose I didn’t hold that against them. Gamma Junction made Tijuana look cosmopolitan.
And I was staring at them like one of the rubes they thought we were as we passed, heading through the street markets towards the rows of squared-off, single-story businesses built as cheaply as possible from local wood and stone.
“I wonder if these are the same guys who flew that shuttle over to Hellnick’s land last night?” I nudged Clines. “You must have heard it, right?”
“Yeah, I heard it,” he said. His mouth clamped shut as if he wanted to say more but was reticent, which was so totally unlike him it worried me.
“What?” I prompted.
“It wasn’t the first one I heard,” he said. His mouth pressed into a tight line and I thought he might say nothing more on the subject, but he snarled his way out of the expression. “I started hearing them a few weeks ago, coming in pretty regular.”
“And you never said anything?” Vicky seemed astonished, and I was sure it was not at the idea that Hellnick was having regular, clandestine shuttle flights out to his property but at the concept that Clines wouldn’t have been clucking about it every single day like a constipated hen.