Recruiting
Mariem set the last crate onto the tidy fort she’d built in front of the Fénix. Each weighed a hundred-plus kilos, and Mariem cursed Carlos for never coming back with that forklift. The Callisto labor colony raised her big, so she could handle the load, and Carlos would’ve just gotten in the way, but it was the principle of the thing.
She’d known the old man for sixteen years, and he never failed to get under her skin. Carlos had found her on the interplanetary Lucha Libre circuit, where bruisers from the Callisto ice mines—known as Ice Giants—were a popular attraction; at just over two meters, Mariem was short for that crowd but a top-notch fighter, and it was good money for a teenager. He’d offered a sense of purpose, something bigger than herself—which was exactly what she didn’t want. “Honest work” had made her an orphan at twelve; she preferred honest pay for beating the shit out of people. He went and bought out her contract anyway, put her on the Zentari-Neys payroll as his yeoman, and filled in the blank under Guardian on her paperwork. She’d never call him Dad.
The universe loves a good joke, however, and in under a decade, Admiral Santiago retired dishonorably. Mariem followed him. Some might call that loyalty, but there was a fair bit of frustration and rebellious angst involved. How dare they? That man pulled her out of hell.
Now their only purpose was to sell as much junk as possible to fund Carlos’s wandering. Mariem pounded the crate; the contents shifted and tinkled. This trip? Fidgets. Tiny toys that kept rich kids’ hands busy, and poor kids’ hands working.
She laced her fingers behind her head and rolled her neck until it popped like a bubble-wrap orchestra. After months sealed in a dank ship with nothing to do but watch the stars go by, it felt good to get shit done. Now, to replace Titchy.
She liked the little weasel, but Carlos was right; he was a liability—time to put on her recruiting hat. As first-mate, Mariem kept the ship’s task list in her head while Carlos added to it in ways both chaotic and redundant. His attention span needed constant tending, and he trusted her to keep things in order—just like at Zentari-Neys, minus the bullshit paperwork. She preferred it that way; kept the ship from blowing up.
Mariem squatted at the console in the back of the bay and logged in. Pecking in the guest password provided by customer service, she connected to the station network and popped open the local talent pool. Enceladus station kept the occupation of every resident posted to this directory as a matter of policy, so an industrious first-mate could find any expert she needed and harass them even if they were perfectly happy—aka recruiting. Mariem was going to recruit the hell out of some hackers.
As she flipped through the listings, Mariem paid lip-service to Carlos’s restriction on fringe-hackers. Hackers were just IT grunts without cubicles. If you could code, troubleshoot a system, and fix a circuit on the fly, you were valuable in a world that relied on computers to keep from dying in the void—must travel 100%. But Fringe-hackers broke the rules, and while that accounted for most hackers at any port, some went a little further than others, and it wasn’t hard to pick them out from the chaff. Fringe-hackers were the best hackers—if they weren’t, they’d be locked up or dead.
Mariem gasped and halted the auto-scroll on the catalog. Flipping back a few pages, she stared at an image in the middle of the gallery. She squinted, moved closer to the screen, and shook her head. “No Way.”
She tapped the listing. The image embiggened beside columns of skills, background reports, and bio. A pale, gamine face peered out from the imagewith a single green eye; the other hid behind a drape of black hair.
“Well, well. Simonee Saran, huh?” Mariem murmured. “So the jar baby has a name now.”
More than a name—she had a career, and an impressive one. Fringe-level impressive. La bandida especial, as Carlos might say.
Mariem blew out a long breath. “Carlos is gonna have a heart-attack.”
That could wait. The girl owed her—though, if Mariem was honest, it felt the other way around. But she wasn’t dead, and that was a miracle. A relief. Enough reason for Mariem to swipe the dossier to her smartcomm.
With a flick, the console went dark. She ducked into the corridor. After a quick steam-foam shower, she pulled on black jeans, work-boots and an old band shirt. In front of the ship, she set up Titchy McStitchy’s duffel and footlocker like a totem and pinned a pink slip at the top.
With the bay doors locked and perimeter alarms set, Mariem set off to recruit the girl she’d pulled out of hell.
GenHab was a dump. The corridors were clean, but the low-pile carpet was worn to the backing, and the two tones in the two-toned walls were dingy brown under drab beige. Where there were planters, there were no plants.
Simonee’s address appeared as a pulsing blip on Mariem’s navigation app. It was just on the right at the next intersection, and as she rounded that corner with her eyes glued to her smartcomm, she nearly collided with a security officer in the middle of the corridor. Three of them stood there, gear strewn across the corridor in front of a door—Simonee’s apartment number stenciled huge down the center. Three heads swiveled, and three faces regarded Mariem with either surprise or exasperation.
Mariem palmed her smartcomm and slid it into her back pocket. “Pardon me, boys. Do I need to go around?”
“Naw, naw, of course not, miss,” said the oldest of the three, standing back and gesturing at his partners to do the same. “Just, ah, watch your step there.”
Mariem tiptoed around the equipment on the floor, taking note of the payload. There were torches, drills, and a big yellow crate labelled INCENDIARIES. A universal mag-lock key clung to the door like a big black spider. Looks like her employment status is ‘open to work,’ she thought—and then Carlos’s voice drowned it out: NO BANDIDOS! She winced; he was always louder in her head.
“So, what’cha doin’ here with all this stuff?” She asked, putting on the sweetest grin she could muster.
The short one tried to answer first. “I’m afraid that’s classified Ma-”
But the older one stopped him. “The alert’s all over the station, Chili. It’s not like it’s a secret.” He grinned up at Mariem. “We’ve got a thief, miss—lives in this unit. It’s locked up tight, but we’ll get it open. They don’t call us the wrecking crew for nothing.”
He winked. Mariem grimaced.
His partners apparently hadn’t heard of the wrecking crew either; they glared at the older man with furrowed brows.
Mariem smiled and nodded. “Oh, well, I’d better get out of your way then.”
As the officers hissed at each other, Mariem backed down the hall and turned with a wave. She pulled her smartcomm again, and swiped over to the station live-feed. Simonee’s face stared back at her from within a flashing red frame.
The alert promised ten thousand scrip for a sighting. NO BANDIDOS! “Fuuuck.”