Star Binder Read online

  STAR BINDER

  Robert Appleton

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  About the Author

  Part One

  The Skimmers

  C HAPTER 1

  The Day Before Colonial Day

  Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight;

  Red sky at morning, shepherd’s warning.

  Sergei told me that rhyme once, and I’ve never forgotten it. There’s something powerful in that idea of being able to tell the future just by looking up. But the difference is, here on Mars, with that being close to the sky’s natural colour, you kind of have to read your luck elsewhere.

  For a thirteen-year-old drifter like me, Jim Trillion, it isn’t quite so romantic. In fact, it usually involves skimming credits from unsuspecting customers at whichever place I happen to be working at that month.

  Last month, at the Glimmer Arch fast food snack bar way out on the skyway road-stop, not so much. Even the cheeseburgers there left you empty. This month, at the Cydonia Sights shopping mall, even less. But with it being Colonial Day tomorrow—the anniversary of the first human colony created on Mars, over two centuries ago—and the local hotels filling up quicker than beehives, I can practically taste the honey.

  Yep, Sergei and I can make an absolute fortune if we’re lucky. If we don’t get caught first.

  Our day begins the way all days begin in the oases resorts of Mars...with a crime. Not a serious one. No, we don’t roll that way. Many other drifters do, but those grid-lickers never last long outside of colonial custody.

  It’s much safer, and much easier, to skim. And here’s how. A customer taps his account password on the nano-ink tattoo on the back of his hand; that opens up a digital link. And in the split-second while the ink is being scanned at the checkout, our handheld skimmer sends a stealth pulse that hacks the link, lightning quick, and skims a couple of credits off the customer’s account. Just a couple, otherwise you’d get caught in no time.

  It’s like picking pockets digitally. You have to get in close, though, within a few feet, so Sergei and I take turns wiping tables or sweeping up near the checkout, to skim as many people as we can with our portable device. It generally earns us good travel money, enough to get us from place to place and see a fair bit of Mars. We’d never manage that on ordinary juvie wages. A few clips a week, that’s all these establishments pay kids officially. Not even enough to go spend a couple of hours inside a VRI (Virtual Reality Interactive) after paying for food and our cots at the kip-house.

  So far, Birnbaum the cafe owner hasn’t suspected a thing. A pale, gangly guy with a weird allergic reaction to UV sunlight that makes his hands and wrists swell up like inflated red rubber gloves, he’s also the most shameless suck-up I’ve ever met. With his customers, that is. With his staff, especially the older ones like Juan-Carlos and Lucy, he’s a nasty piece of work, not letting them rest for a minute, physically pushing them around, and even threatening their jobs if the customers aren’t completely happy with the service.

  Me and Sergei he likes. Maybe that’s because he has seven kids of his own and probably feels sorry for any youngsters without a home and family. But the way he treats his other staff makes up for it. Birnbaum is a typical oasis proprietor: wealthy, mean, and about to get skimmed.

  A group of sweaty miners caked with red dust gathers at the smell-sim menu outside when Birnbaum says to me, “Chop, chop, kiddo—clear those tables near the door, will you, so these new people will have somewhere to sit.” He sneers at the sight of the filthy workers. “And make sure the skivvies (cleaning robots) are fully charged and ready.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good lad. Where’s your big Russian friend?”

  “Over there near the till.”

  “Why’s he over there when the mess is near the door? Go tell him to wake up and get his—Wait, what’s that in his hand? Is that a—”

  “Is that a what?” Oh God, Sergei is seconds away from skimming two trench coat traders at the checkout. The amber download lights on his thin oval skimmer, which is about the size of a bubble gum card in his hand, flash between his fingers.

  “Yeah, he needs to use a clean cloth, the idiot,” I say, and try to wave a warning to my friend from behind Birnbaum.

  But Sergei doesn’t see me.

  “Wait here, Jim boy. Something’s not quite right,” Birnbaum says as he strides away.

  Crap. Time to leave. I clock two possible exits for when Sergei decides to make a run for it, which will be any second now. One, through the kitchen and out the back, onto the flop-port where cargo supply shuttles regularly land. Dangerous without breathers, and maybe a dead end. Or two, past the dusty miners and onto the main street of the Sights. Maybe straight into the arms of a colonial cop. But at least there we have room to manoeuvre.

  Sergei eyes Birnbaum and continues wiping the table top, having slid the skimmer into his pants pocket. The big guy could easily tackle our gangly boss if he had to, but the café’s getting crowded now and someone else might decide to be a hero and stop Sergei’s escape. You never can tell with people when it comes to Colonial Day. It does funny things to them, for that one day in the year: they look out for each other, especially when it comes to preventing crimes. Some sort of show of unity. Yeah, pity they don’t give a damn at any other time.

  To my great relief, Birnbaum marches straight to the two trench coat traders instead, and ushers them to one side.

  Too close, Sergei, too close.

  Light-headed after holding my breath, I flop onto the nearest chair but miss it and fall in a heap on a lagoon of spilled Coke. Three white-haired Lunar girls at a nearby table laugh at me, filming me with their omnicams. Rachel Foggerty’s with them—lovely Rachel from my Juve-Ed class, who’s entering the junior triathlon in tomorrow’s Games—but she doesn’t laugh. She offers to help me up instead. I tell her thanks but I can manage.

  “Where’s a lifeguard when you need one, huh?” one of them says.

  “Where’s a zookeeper when you need one,” I shoot back, to which they give off infuriating oohs and jabber among themselves in that breathless Moonspeak no one except those from Lunar One can decipher. At least Rachel isn’t obnoxious like that. She nods politely at her friends’ remarks but keeps an eye on me instead. It’s only fair, I guess, after all the times I’ve watched her poolside, but why—why, God, why—did she have to see me fall on my butt?

  After escaping into the kitchen to dry myself off, I pat Sergei’s pocket and whisper, “That was close. I thought he had you.”

  “Ah, me too.”

  “What was all that about—with the trench coat men? Did you hear anything?”

  “Yeah, they’re off-worlders,” Sergei replies. “One of them paid with real physical credits. That’s why I couldn’t skim them.”

  “Who are they?�
��

  Sergei shrugs his huge shoulders.

  “Well, be more careful in future, numbnuts. We nearly blew our Colonial pay-day.”

  He snorts a laugh. “You talk big for someone who just wet himself. Maybe you’d better skim while I go play at being a skivvy for a bit—”

  “All right, all right, Sergei. We get the point.”

  “You do?”

  “We all know what you are.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Dumb all day.”

  “Ooh. Now you’ve no choice but to say it.”

  “It.”

  “And the rest,” he says. “Or I renegotiate your cut. A zero will be involved—quite a lonely one.”

  I sigh, flick my wet cloth at him. He forms his thumb and forefinger into a zero and pretends to kiss it. “Okay, okay, you’re the best skimmer I’ve ever met, Sergei, and I’d be nowhere without you.”

  “And what else am I?”

  “The Minsk Machine. Made for war, women, and cleaning toilet—”

  “Ah, ah.”

  “Made for war, women, and the Soviet way.”

  Sergei admires his reflection in the sink mirror, pouts, and combs his scruffy dark hair back behind his ears. He has an odd, scrunched weatherworn face that girls seem to like. I wouldn’t say he’s handsome, but he does look as hard as brick, and has a charming lopsided smile. Then he curls his arm over my shoulders, the one thing in the world that always makes me feel safe. “Horosho, Trillion, ochen horosho. You stick with me and we’ll be off-world in no time.”

  “Yeah, I’m kinda thinking no on that. Seeing as no one in my family’s ever made it off this rock since they first colonized the place.”

  “True. But then you can succeed where they failed.”

  “Maybe if we skimmed a few kings and presidents first.”

  “Stride with pride, Trillion. Stride with pride.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you never let on you’re desperate, you never let others see your weakness.”

  “Word?”

  “Word.”

  Birnbaum calls after us both. I lift my friend’s muscular arm in order to escape. “Be careful. It’s gonna get crowded in a hurry.”

  “What am I again?”

  I shake my head and grin. “The Minsk Machine.”

  “Made for what?”

  “War, women, and the Soviet way.”

  “Ochen Horosho.”

  “Da.”

  “Da.”

  “Just one more thing, Minsk Machine,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your apron’s in the borscht.” I run out before the swearing begins.

  If I’d had an older brother, I’d want him to be a lot like Sergei. Almost two years my senior, Sergei would gladly throw himself into the path of a crashing meteorite for me. And to be honest he might not come off worst; he’s built like a tungsten blast door and could definitely have been a wrestler or a high-g miner or something if things had worked out differently. If his life hadn’t seen red sky at morning. He doesn’t say much in public, so people think he’s shy, but it always makes you sit up and listen when he does speak.

  Born in Minsk, in the New Soviet Union, he lost his family, the Balakirevs, in the immigration riots on Mars when he was four. Around the time I was graduating out of diapers, Sergei was breaking out of his second government orphanage. Around the time I’d put two of my crayon drawings up on the hospital wall after having my tonsils out, Sergei had put two boys in the hospital. They’d tried to skim his skimmings while he was asleep. And somewhere around the time my dad and sister were being buried in a cheap grave somewhere outside Bowman’s Reach, when I was still figuring out how to steal my first hot dog, Sergei was already boosting his first skycab.

  We met at Fanta Uno, one of the posh resorts in the Vastitas Borealis basin in the north, near the famous Big Red theme park, where I’d hoped to pick the pockets of a few rich holidaymakers. I was seven at the time, Sergei nine. And only a timely intervention from Sergei—pretending we were brothers, and that our parents were waiting for us at the skyport—had saved me from being detained when I’d wandered into a restricted banking area thinking it was a good place to get lucky. A good place to be skinned alive, more like. Ever since then Sergei has taken it upon himself to mentor me in the ways of life as a true skimmer, just like his old mentor, Melekhin, taught him before he got life in prison. Since that day the two of us have been inseparable.

  But Mars is slowly shrinking for us, one crime at a time.

  At the end of each month—any longer than that in one job and Sergei is convinced we’ll be found out—we pack our shrink carriers, leave our rented cots and our jobs, and migrate to the next skimming opportunity, usually in a new resort. There are only so many of those. It’s a rootless way to live, but with Sergei around it’s never dull. After a good week we’ll spend a few days in the VRI arcades, or hire a sand bike each—a racer that flies a few feet above the ground at frightening speeds—or watch girls around the pools in the posh hotels.

  At night in our cheap cots, we’ll make up stories about voyaging to the stars, fighting the Sheikers and the Finaglers across the 100z border colonies. I’ll tell him the tales I heard from my dad, passed down through the generations of Trillions, about the first pioneers on Mars. Sergei will go back even further, to stories of the various Russian revolutions on Earth he’s experienced in VRI movies, or to the space race of the mid twentieth century, when the Soviets were the first to achieve everything in space flight except the biggest prize—first man on the moon.

  One day, Sergei maintains, it will be our turn, we’ll get to go off-world and see amazing things. Things no orphan skimmer should ever get to see. Things no human has ever seen.

  I do a quick calculation in my head, based on our current income, and tell him we’ll be the oldest, dumbest, most liver-spotted space voyagers who ever lived by the time we can afford a shuttle off Mars.

  He snatches the bottle of diluted Vodka McCormick’s off me, shrugs, and then downs the whole freaking lot.

  That was a few weeks ago. I can still hear him puking, banging into things on his way to and from the communal toilet all night. It was the most ill I’ve ever seen him, and he’s sworn never to touch booze again. The Soviet way no longer includes Vodka, it seems. Which leaves war and women. And to be honest he isn’t exactly the world’s authority on those either.

  But he’s in good spirits today, despite almost being clocked by Birnbaum and then dipping his apron in the beetroot soup. He skims the odd customer now and then but doesn’t push it. He hands the device to me for a spell when he’s told to clean up outside the café.

  After an hour or so of missed opportunities, I get lucky. An old woman pays for about fifteen of her friends. I think it might be some kind of Neo-Christian church group. The skim from that sweet little transaction nets us a slick nine credits, a record at Cydonia Sights!

  I’m swivelling away in triumph, using my doe-eyed innocent look to hide the victory from the rest of the café when, from out of nowhere, a huge hand squeezes my arm. “That wasn’t nice, kid. Don’t do it again.”

  The shock punches a breath out of me. I stare, mortified, at the tip of a sunburnt nose and a twitching, downturned mouth surrounded by a jaw full of stubble—the rest of the man’s hooded face is hidden by shadow. It’s one of the trench coat traders. He doesn’t look up.

  “Get off me.” I try to prise his fingers loose. I’m really looking for Sergei, as I’m nowhere near strong enough. And I really hate feeling this small, this helpless.

  “Just be careful who you steal from,” he says. I know that voice from somewhere, but right now it’s the voice of an angry angel letting me off the hook.

  “Sorry.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I won’t do it again.”

  “Really.” His sarcasm is light, it skims off me. Whoever this man is, he’s distracted. I’m an aftertho
ught here. I swear he’s looking at the three men sat across the café—they have their backs to him. They’re smartly dressed. White collar. Sipping at their beverages robotically, not talking to each other, gazes fixed on the reflective panel between the napkin dispenser and a poster of those two famous squat aliens who endorsed a make of lemon ice cream several years ago. The men appear to be watching the whole café in that reflection. This trench coat trader in particular.

  When I ask who they are, he lets go of me. “Don’t know, kid. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Then run along. Stay out of trouble.” A half-assed thing to say. So I back away and pretend to wipe the table behind him, but keep on watching. There’s something strange going on here. Sergei said these trench coat guys paid in real clips. They don’t have ink, which means they’re not eligible to vote in any Interstellar Planetary Administration election. But unless you’re under sixteen, you can’t gain entry to an oasis without having ink. So they’ve either figured a way to fool security, or they have ISPA immunity. Trench coat traders with political immunity? Ridiculous. So who are they?

  And why are they being watched?

  One of the white collar men gets up to leave, takes his jacket off the back of the chair. Something drops from it. A transparent card of some kind. When he bends to pick it up, I glimpse a weird, angular tattoo at the base of his neck. Some sort of off-world glyph. Both the trench coat men must have seen it as well because they nudge each other and their hoods crease at the same time, as if they’ve shared a nod.

  What does the glyph mean?

  A moment later, the other two white collar men put their coats on and leave the café. The first stays behind to pay at the checkout. No words pass between them. They’re either the worst lunch buddies of all time or they’re up to something. So are the trench coat traders.

  Suddenly it makes it all right for me to be doing what I do. All this sly behaviour—watching watchers’ watchers watch from across the room—it’s just what I need. On my way to the kitchen I whip out the skimmer and wedge it in the folds of the cloth I use to wipe the side counter. It’s pointed at the white collar man.