Skyfall Dawn

An old sign hung haphazardly above the door of the place, supported by a few thick strands of rusting wire. It spelled out “Chief's” in large neon letters that had originally been red, and cast long shadows on the surrounding tenements. The rain and lightning of the passing storm added gothic to the pink light of old neon.

“De Maestro return to Babylon.” A voice colored with Caribbean voodoo called as a shadow detached from the darkness of an alley and stepped into the mist-diffused light, a ghost from the past with thick dreadlocks that fell to the man’s waist. "Ah been waitin 'ere a mos long time, Bruddah ‘jax, standin 'ere takin mah fill o' dis debil rain. I should hab known de stormbird come on de wings o' de storm."

“Brother Dizzy!”

The memories of good times shared with the tall adept and the rest of the Alpha Perfects flashed back from the dark pits where they had almost been forgotten.

Ajax howled with elation and embraced Dizzy like family. The Alpha Perfects considered themselves to be just that. When Ajax had left, the only things that mattered were the bacchanalian combinations of boozing, stimming, and chasing Terra Angels on Friday and Saturday nights.

“What are you still doing here?” Ajax said as he released Dizzy from his welcome.

“Same o, same all, mon,” Dizzy said. His dreadlocks danced as he shrugged. “Seekin de path tah Moun' Zion.”

“Word.”

“I got d’word for ya,” Dizzy snorted as he reached into a large pocket and withdrew something wrapped in plastic. It was the size of his thumb. "Dah las’ word. Ya ben up tah see dah wondahs, mon. Too right ya tell poor Dizzy how ees done."

"Get a job that takes you there." Ajax said as he accepted the package from Dizzy and examined it. The pungent aroma of Ganja met his nostrils. Dizzy undoubtedly had quantities of other illegal “products:” DreamStim, Meth, and NightLace someplace on his person. "What's this?"

“Ees de las o' mah crop, mon. Ah ben savin eet for a rainy day." Dizzy said, put his head back and let the rain hit his face. "De Elders mus’ be smilin for ya come back an eet rain like we ned tah rais’n Ark.”

He roared out laughter at the torrent. The taste of Dizzy’s harvest was a welcome home gift to a brother, missing for years, who had finally returned to the family, the prodigal cousin if not the son.

“De bruddahs ‘ave gaddah'd tah give ya a mos' propah welcome home. Ya know de where an de when.”

“I’ll be there, Dizzy. I have to see the Chief first, but I’ll be there.” Ajax said as he clapped Dizzy on his shoulder and turned away.

"Den we start widout you, Bruddah ‘jax, take eet to dah next lebel when ya come." Dizzy called at his back. "Don be long, de Terra Angels almos be fahgettin ya name."

Guarding the front door of Chief’s was a large Enforcer decorated with the METRO police logo down each side. It shifted on its treads and swiveled its bulbous head to give Ajax a scan as he walked by, comparing his profile to those of the wanted felons it kept in memory. Pock-marks on its armored frame were evidence of where some fragger had made the mistake of shooting at it instead of just giving up. Enforcers were bullet-proof and weather-proof, a good thing; two hundred years of concentrated industrial warming had altered the climate. Sea level rise had displaced millions from coastal areas worldwide. New Yorkers had built a wall around their islands to eventually keep the water out. Nothing could be done about the people the flooded the streets instead, except by moving as many as possible off-planet.

“Keep moving.” Words came out of the Enforcer’s voice modulator as it returned to its slow left to right scanning. Ajax kept moving.

Immediately inside the double doors was a formidable looking man with a face marred by a long white scar, who scowled at him from behind the bullet-proof shield of a weapons scanner, the bouncer. He knew the bouncer's name was Angus and that Angus only had one hand. The other had been lost to a booby-trapped Octavian Militia helmet he had fancied as a souvenir.

"Oye, birk." Angus said in greeting. He could still hold a gun and squeeze the trigger with the Second-Hand prosthesis he had been fitted with upon discharge. Though he was not carrying one, Ajax sensed a weapon within easy reach.

“So what you got an Enforcer outside for? This is still the Chief’s, right?” At the question, Angus shrugged his hairy shoulders.

“Dunno, birk," He said. "The robots just show up, stay till their batteries run low, then get move on back to where ever they come from.”

“How can you tell?” Ajax said and squeezed past the detector, which failed to register any devices on his person. "When their batteries run out, I mean?"

"They start beeping, how else?" Angus said, his hard expression unchanging. The man was supposed to have a mean temper and horror stories circulated around frontier merchant havens by free-traders who’d experienced his wrath first-hand.

The inside of the bar was a step up from that of the DeepCore. The only illumination in the place came from the light over the booze rack and from neon signs on the wall advertising labels like "Luna Bock" and "Astro Ale." The Chief was sitting at the bar, sharing a drink with a patron and telling a joke that Ajax heard more times than he knew.

“Professor Heisenberg is on his way home from the lab and he gets pulled over by a skimmer cop,” The Chief said and struggled to keep from giggling at his own joke. “The cop comes up to the window and asks him if he knows how fast he was going…”

“…And Heisenberg says, no, but I know where I am.” Ajax said along with the Chief as he delivered the punchline. The patron laughed as the Chief whipped his head around to see who had upstaged him. When he saw who it was his face split into a grin.

“Ajax? How the hell are ya?” Master Chief (Retired) Seamus McMillan rumbled, waving Ajax into chair now vacant beside him. “How’d you like Solmax?”

Right to business then. “It was miserable, Chief. It was so bad it makes me want to hang up my flight-suit," Ajax said as he took off his wet jacket and hung it on the back of the stool. "I suppose I have you to thank for getting me out of there.”

The Chief pish-poshed the thought away as he pulled a cigar from a wooden humidor, clipped it, and lit the blunt tip with an antique Zippo. The anchor-in-orbit symbol of the old Space Command adorned the relic’s burnished silver shell on one side. Ajax smiled as somewhere in his head someone said the words, “He got it.”

“I got to look after my people, but getting you out I had nothing to do with,” The Chief said and offered a cigar to Ajax, who politely declined. “The shipment they took from you never made it into evidence. Oh yeah, some guy named Dizzy was in here looking for you."

"He just wanted to say welcome home.”

“I never trusted that Brotherhood you used to hang out with, but what the hell, you just got out of the Max. Do whatever you want to.” The Chief said and sent a lungful of blue smoke wafting toward the air scrubbers laboring in the ceiling. Over the years, body-banks citywide had provided him with two transplanted lungs and a new liver, all vat grown or harvested from recent cadavers.

“I appreciate that, Chief, but I need your advice. I got a problem I was hoping you could help me with.”

“So I’ve heard. They tell me that you had to sell the Utburd to pay your fine,” The Chief said and gave an indifferent shrug. “That’s really tough. If you’re looking to take on a few more runs, I might be able to help arrange something.”

"That's not all of it, Chief. Solmax scared me. I'd rather die than go back there." Ajax said, unable to look his longtime friend and mentor in the eye.

“So what am I supposed to do about it? Geez, I don't see you for ten years while you're off raising hell on the frontier and you come back needing a favor?” The Chief said and waved his cigar in theatric disbelief. “Someone tell me where the justice is?”

"I want out, Chief, I don’t want to do anymore runs. You should’ve seen the boat that took me in,” Ajax said. The Devonshire had been huge compared to the Utburd 3. “Next time they might decide not to give me a warning before they blast me. Next time I might not get so lucky."

"Let's see if I understand this correctly," The Chief said and looked very confused. "You don't want to do anymore ‘special’ runs for us but you want to run something mainstream instead?"

"Yeah, that's pretty much it."

The Chief smiled, spun on his stool and barked an order at the bartender, "Julio! Line 'em up. Open a bottle of the good stuff!"

He clapped Ajax on the shoulder as the bartender set up several shot-glasses and filled them with green liquid, Centaurian Brandy, a fancy name for the sweet, green distillate produced on the stations in the Alpha Centauri system. The Chief raised one in toast.

"You know I was never one to tell you what you should do with your life, but it's about god-damned time you came to your senses."

Ajax picked up a shot and tapped it against the Chief's. The good-stuff was open. It would have been an insult to refuse. The liquor made his mouth numb wherever it touched. It was several minutes before the effect wore off and he could speak again.

“Can you help me?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” The Chief said and slammed his empty shot-glass down on the bar. “But you just took the first step toward a new life. Have another drink.”

What Ajax thought would be a quick visit turned into one several hours long. One toast turned into four, then eight. The Chief poured more shots from the nearly empty bottle and offered yet another toast, this one for the Space Command, the next one was for the Fleet. His old eyes glinted with mischief at the irony. The bottle had come from one of the past loads Ajax had brought in.

“Just so you know, you can stay upstairs until you get back on your feet, I insist, Constance insists. She wants you over for dinner tomorrow night.”

There was a place above the bar where the Chief stayed on rare nights, now that he was past sixty, though his wife Constance would still put him out if he came home drunk. Before Ajax could decline, the Chief rose from his stool and staggered off to retrieve the room keys, stored in a cigar box behind the Shok-Stik baton he kept beneath the bar. He gave them a toss. Ajax fell off his stool trying to make the catch.

I have to go find Dizzy. Ajax reminded himself as rose shakily to his feet. The Chief would spend the night in a hotel. He bellowed out a farewell and instructions as Ajax staggered to the door.

“Stop by tomorrow!”

As far as urban gangs went, the Alpha Perfects had real influence in the Teterboro area mostly, with occasional fighting for control of regions a few blocks north or south. The loose circle of large hab-complexes that formed their territory was well circulated by pedestrian and vehicle traffic, a counter-point to the walled-enclaves that well-heeled humanity was in full-retreat behind.

As the business and communication towers grew skyward, the once-low rent spaces were “enjoying the development management of sympathetic entities,” arbiter-jargon for local redevelopment funds donated by rich philanthropists at the heads of large corporations, but there were places where that influence had not yet reached. Noone came into Teterboro without paying “tax.”

The gangers still knew how to throw a party and their allied Terra Angels were still heart-stoppers of the most natural sort, not a variant among them. Dizzy introduced him to a firebrand named Felicity, an angel initiate. Everything after that was a blur of hard beats and bodies moving in rhythm, old-friends and new faces that took some getting used to. Felicity had seen him home and stayed for breakfast, but too much Brandy otherwise ruined a night to remember.

Ajax awoke when she slipped out from beneath the covers and padded towards the shower-room in just panties. A single pair of wings had been inked between her shoulders. Advocates and adepts, ranking members of the Terra Angels, had more drawn down the center of their backs.

The storm, if not the celebration, from the previous night, still raged. Although the room was well-lit by large windows, the omni-present cloud-cover reduced the ambient light to a morbid gray. Thunder chased the wind through the artificial canyons formed by mid-town star-scrapers and arcologies, gathering speed, sucking at the plexi-glass windows as they swept by.

"I found this under the door, brother Ajax." Felicity said and handed him a folded sheet of paper before crawling back under the covers. “What’s Skyfall?”

“What do you mean?” Ajax said as he unfolded the letter, surprised that she would ask. Felicity yawned and closed her eyes, laying her head on her hands.

“You talk in your sleep.”

“Meeting: 11:00 am: downstairs.” He read the Chief's characteristic scratch quietly aloud. A look at the clock next to the bed caused Ajax's heart to jump. The following panicked spasm shook the bed and woke Felicity again.

11:05? Fek! He mentally cursed as he sprang out of the bed. Felicity snickered as his legs tangled in the sheet, tripping him up as he rushed to pull clean clothes out of his travel bag.

"Is something wrong, Ajax?"

"I got business, girl, He said hurriedly as he pulled on his trousers. "I'm late, my clothes look like they’ve been shot with a double-barreled wrinkle gun, and where the fek are my boots!"

"They're in the shower room."

Ajax collected his boots and pulled them on as he hurried down the stairs. The Enforcer METRO 8 had been replaced by METRO 12.

The clock above the bar hit 11:10 as he walked through the door, dripping wet from the seconds he was exposed to the downpour. The best he hoped for was the torrential rain to disguise his sloth. The Chief was nowhere to be seen but a man in a suit was leaning against the bar, drinking coffee and trading remarks with the bartender in rapid-fire Spanish. He turned and smiled as Ajax approached, extending a manicured hand.

“Melvin Kinkaid?” He said affably. “Thank you for taking time to meet with me. Artemis Cutter.”

“Nice to meet you although I have to admit, I prefer other names.”

“I don’t blame you.” Cutter said and offered a firm handshake.

He reminds me of the spec-ops types I ran into on Octavia. Ajax realized as he mentally snapped his fingers. It was the way Cutter carried himself; aloof, subtly arrogant, and kind of funny. The eyes said it all. If this man had to raise his voice then the smleck was about to hit the blower.

“Then again,” Ajax said, wanting coffee, but the bartender had left them alone to talk. “It’s not often that a man in my situation is presented with an opportunity like this. Call me whatever you like.”

“Right to business then. Good, I hate small talk.” Cutter said though Ajax felt that statement, at best, was only partially true. I represent the TIL Corporation . I’m sure you’re aware of who we are. We’re not just a manufacturer. We also provide survey resources to select clients," Cutter said as he set his coffee mug down still half-full. "In short, we send survey ships out to the frontier looking for extrasolar bodies. If we find any, TIL gets concessions toward exploitation rights once our clients lay claim. It’s very lucrative."

"So what does this have to do with me?"

"It’s got everything to do with you," Cutter said with a snort at the impatience in Ajax’s voice. "I’ve known Seamus for years and he says that you’re a good pilot, which is enough for me, but that's not all. Your experience as a free-merchant, shall we say, and your extensive knowledge of the frontier are particularly valuable to us.”

"Go on." Ajax said, half-angry, half-embarrassed by Cutter’s reference to his shady past, but was is part of the business. Cutter had undoubtedly done his checking. Ajax got the bartenders attention with a wave and pointed a finger at the coffee cup on the bar.

“We're looking for someone tested, a quick thinker, someone who's not afraid to use the resources placed at his disposal,” Cutter said. Ajax leaned closer as his voice dropped to a whisper. “I know you had fourteen victories during Procyon, Ajax, an ace more than twice over. I know that you put the fear of God into those Octavian savages. What did they call you? Utburd?" He pronounced it gutterally, deep in his throat, the way Octavians did.

"That's the past. I don't put anything into anybody anymore." Ajax said. A panel in the bar-top opened and his coffee-cup, filled with soy-based Lava-Java caffeine solution, came up through it on a serving block. The coffee-flavoring additive was touted to taste like the real thing, but he’d never had it.

"Humility from a rocket-jock. Interesting," Cutter said and shook his head. "You can't escape your past, Ajax. We need people who have learned their lessons the hard way. If we wanted just a good pilot I wouldn't be here, I'd be up at the Merchant Marine Academy. I need a good pilot and then some."

"Then what do you want with me?” Ajax said and stirred in sugar. “If you know about me, then you know how my last career ended."

"Accidents happen," Cutter replied as he opened his briefcase and lifted out a holo-interface Sony. "We're willing to take our chances. If you’re interested, I’ve already got a contract drawn up, the same contract all of our courier pilots get, except with a few bonuses I think you would find very generous.”

He pushed the datapad across the bar into Ajax's hands.

“You could start tomorrow with Mister Durham. Think about it. To be needed, to be part of a team again. No more living day to day, worried about where the next cargo will come from, or that customs frigate waiting for you at the jump point. Think about it, but please don't take long. The window for this opportunity is very short.” Cutter finished his pitch and reached for his mug of Lava-Java, a smug devil expecting a foregone answer, but Ajax had no soul to sell, only time.

Back into action again. Ajax thought as he scrolled through the contract and studied the parts not written in legal jargon. They do take such good care of their people. A smile slowly broke over his face as he read down the list of benefits.

“I don’t know why you want me,” Ajax said as he laid the Sony down on the bar. “But I’m in, I’m definitely in.”

“Welcome to our team,” Cutter said as he stood and took his overcoat off the back of the chair. He removed a wireless communicator from the pocket, punched in a number, and put the matchbox-sized device to his ear. “I’m ready.”

In less than a minute a black skimmer-car was idling outside the main entrance. Several large men got out of the back and took up positions around the car. They left the car door open, and through the rain Ajax could see a brunette reclined on the backseat, blowing smoke drawn from a long stem-burner, looking impatiently out towards the bar.

"You made the right choice," Cutter said as he slipped his arms into the sleeves of the coat and returned the datapad to the briefcase. "We're very glad to have you on-board, all we expect from you is your best, of course."

***

The rain stopped in time for Ajax to go out for a haircut and a new suit. Little Beijing was the closest retail district and his Citizen ID let him ride the old subway there for free. The Metro Commuter, a monorail train suspended above the streets by flying-buttress supports built onto the sides of the midtown high-rises, was still in planning when he had shipped out for the Procyon system. Long since operational, it was faster, cleaner, and quieter than the electric cars in the tunnels beneath the streets, but there were no Commuter platforms within walking distance of where he needed to go.

The company prided itself on what it called “giving back.” He held a printout he’d generated from the TIL netsite as the subway hummed through the tunnel, the other hand on the nearest support pole, leaning in response to the subway as it slowed to enter a curve. He flipped the page once the car straightened.