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  “Hgnh!” Duke 66 suddenly convulsed in his chair, as Solomon swore that he even heard a muted fizzing sound, but the large man had nowhere to go. He couldn’t contort with his hands in manacles in his lap, and he couldn’t hunch away from whatever pain was coursing through his body. Solomon saw the man’s jaw clench in a rictus, and his eyes roll back white…

  “Just a small electric shock.” The warden talked over Duke 66’s convulsing body. “Not even that powerful, really. I’ve got loads more settings here…” Coates kept his eyes fixed on Solomon. “The chip acts as a tracker and can deliver enough of a shock to stop your heart, if I want to…”

  “Grfhhhk…!” The big man started to drool. Solomon knew that Duke 66 was a bad guy, but all he could think about was that Earth was disappearing behind him and this guy had made some bad decisions just as everyone had, and now he would never get to feed one of his precious pigeons ever again.

  “Look, it was just a joke…” Solomon heard himself say, feeling his heart start to pound. Don’t lose your temper, Solomon, don’t… the sanest knot of thoughts inside Solomon’s head tried to warn him.

  “What did you say to me, Convict 7203?” the warden hissed. “A joke. Did you just tell me that you heard a joke?”

  He’s a little man with his five minutes of power… Solomon’s jaw clenched. He had never liked people like that. “He’s got the message. Everyone has…” Solomon said.

  “DO YOU SEE ME LAUGHING, CONVICT!?” the warden suddenly screamed, tapping the dial on his device for the shock in Duke Ormskert’s neck to suddenly ramp up in intensity.

  “hgk—!” The large man was beyond even making intelligible noises now as his body trembled, his breathing came in rapid gasps, and blood started to run from his mouth where he must have bitten his tongue.

  Don’t lose your temper, don’t lose your temper… Solomon breathed.

  “No, you don’t.” The warden suddenly, inexplicably, clicked off the electricity with a twitch of his finger, and Duke slumped forward, panting. “Which I think sets the record straight for everyone!”

  Solomon watched as the warden leaned over and put the device to his own neck, and he braced for the torment he was about to be put through. The entire shuttle around them was silent.

  “Seeing as you two are such good buddies already, Mr. Cready—” Warden Coates jabbed the injector into Solomon’s neck.

  “Ach!” He felt a stab of pain as it felt like a needle lodged itself straight into his spinal column. Maybe it had.

  “—you’ll get to keep each other company on Titan until the day you die.”

  Solomon gritted his teeth and waited for the electric shock, but it didn’t come. It seemed that the warden had made his point. He could make each and every one of their lives a living hell if he wanted to, whenever he wanted to…

  2

  Space Dreams

  “Left, right, left, right, march! I’ve never seen such a bunch of disorganized schlubs in all my life!” The bark of Warden Coates followed Solomon and the others through Shanghai Platform’s entrance lounge.

  Despite the glittering lights of the fast food outlets—McBurgers! Astro-Chilli! Hajaput Deli!—and the waves of welcoming synth music that greeted them, it was hard to not feel somber as they were marched through the main concourse, with other tourists and commuters scattering like fish from the shackled, gray-suited cadre.

  “What do you think they done?” Solomon heard a boy whisper to his impeccably business-suited father.

  “Don’t look at them. They are bad men,” was the response that Solomon heard, and found himself agreeing.

  If they only knew. His eyes slid off the neon amusements, finding no excitement or pleasure in their temporary distraction. If only Matthias could see him now. If only Matthias was still alive.

  Solomon sighed as he was jostled by the convict next to him as they passed beyond the visa checkpoint, being waved through by the large, exo-suited guards with their mecha-hounds standing, whirring and ready, at their sides. They were corralled into a long, silver-steel corridor that ended in one large. bulkhead-airlock door. The right-hand side of the corridor was given over to long oval shapes, pods that stood out a little from the wall with white surfaces apart from one very small porthole near the top. They all looked suspiciously like coffins, or sarcophagi, to Solomon’s eyes, and when he cast a look inside one, he saw foam padding covering the interior.

  “Left, right, march! Left, right, halt!” Coates followed them in and hit the door controls for the route back to the light and life of the Shanghai Platform.

  This is it. Solomon felt the murmur of agitation pass through the assembled condemned, but no one dared move now that Warden Coates had the small chip-controller raised in the air for all to see.

  “No funny business, right, ladies and gents?” the warden said, hitting a button that released the door mechanisms. The lids of each of the pods slid open to reveal just what Solomon had feared. They were sleep pods, intended to keep the human body alive—if just barely—as they traveled the many days, months, and weeks at sub-light speed. Solomon guessed that the Confederate Department of Justice and Defense didn’t go so far as to provide passage on an actual faster-than-light ship for mere criminals.

  “I’m sure you all know what comes next. Step inside, if you please…” The warden’s eyes glittered over them, searching for any reason to use his stunner.

  With a few muttered swear words, the deportees from Earth did as they were told, and Solomon found himself lying slightly back on a foam mattress that was almost comfortable—until the door hissed shut.

  Never going to see Earth again… Solomon started to panic, sweat trickling down his brow as the door snapped shut, leaving him the small viewing porthole at the empty corridor beyond. I don’t want this, his nervous thoughts raced. What were the statistics of people dying in these things? Ten percent? Twenty? Didn’t he read some blog story once about how dangerous these things were…

  I deserve this, a part of him answered back.

  But the panic was too great, and he was just about to hammer on the lid of what was beginning to feel more and more like a coffin, when with a hiss, suddenly the foam padding around him inflated, squeezing his arms to his torso and his legs together. He couldn’t move.

  Hssssss! A slightly opaque gas was being pumped into the chamber, and Solomon couldn’t do anything about it.

  What had the warden meant earlier when he said that he had something extra special in store for me? He worried, trying to move his head, but it too was cushioned by the expanded foam.

  “No—” he managed to grunt, just before the gas made its way into his nose, down into his lungs, and into his bloodstream. His thoughts felt fuzzy and thick. His eyes were closing—

  And in that moment before sleep overtook him, Solomon thought that he saw the face and little peaked cap of Warden Coates appear in front of his porthole window, grinning victoriously.

  “What, no time for duty-free?” Matthias, Solomon’s oldest—also his last—friend said with his trademark grin.

  His friend was devilishly good-looking in a way that Solomon had always been envious of. Compared to Matthias Sozer with his flick of artfully messy brown hair and square jaw, even his taste in smart synth shirts, Solomon felt weedy and unimportant.

  It had always been like that between them. Matthias being the handsome one, the charming one, the one with the gift of talk that could make the bargirls blush and draw people to his side as if he had known them his whole life.

  Matthias had a way of putting people at ease that Solomon never would have, and Solomon knew it. When people saw Solomon, it was always as if they pulled back just a little. Maybe they could sense from the way that Solomon’s brows were in a near perpetual frown that he wasn’t to be trusted. That Solomon was looking for an edge, and that he might just use them to get it.

  Which was true, of course.

  But with Matthias, it was different, which was why they had made such a
good team on the few times that Solomon had called him in. Matthias would sweet talk the agents or the bosses or the contacts, while Solomon did what needed to be done. Which usually involved quite a lot of sneaking, sometimes breaking past digital security, and very occasionally pointing a gun at people’s heads.

  Just like I pointed a gun at someone else…

  “No time for duty-free, man! Get your head in the game!” Solomon remembered saying as the pair walked past another kiosk full of cheap imported Saki and Japanese brandy. The credits that they were asking for here were pennies compared to what these things would go for down on Earth.

  But Solomon ignored them, as his game was far larger than getting some cheap tax-free imports. He paused beside a newsstand and counted to five, pretending to read the flickering screens of stories that activated as soon as he drew near.

  “No need to be so touchy, sheesh!” Matthias was like that. It didn’t matter if he was face to face with an Enforcer in their tactical exo-armor or in the middle of a firefight in downtown New Kowloon, he was always ready with a throwaway joke. “Say, look at this. Big re-development plan announced for New Kowloon.” Matthias gestured at the screen that lit up his face with its bluish-white light.

  Dammit. The mayor had announced it already. That was bad news. Bad news for them, anyway. They would need to get moving fast, before the visa guards got the word to look for them…

  “Come on.” Solomon nodded to the exit gates that led to the Shanghai Platform elevators, manned by the guards in their heavy exo-armor, looking almost like crabs with enough firepower to clear this entire floor if they wanted to. “You go first,” Solomon said tersely, slipping Matthias the identity card that he had made up for him. Matthias had to go first. He was the one who could sweettalk the devil, right?

  “But…why…?” Matthias’s voice sounded strange, strangled and thick. He had never said those words there, and then.

  “Come on!” Solomon urged him, reaching out to shake his friend’s arm.

  “Sol…why are you doing this to me?” Again, Matthias’s words didn’t fit what had actually happened. He sounded scared, and Matthias never got scared.

  Well, he had once…

  “Fracking Hell, Matty!” Solomon pulled on his friend’s shoulder, for Matthias to stumble, turning away from the flickering light of the news screen and looking at him with his ruined face.

  “Why, Sol?” Gone were Matthias’s good looks, replaced by an ugly, swelling bruise on one side of his face and blood from a split lip. But even that wasn’t the worst part… The other side of his face was a mess, as there was a terrible wound where his eye had been. The sort of wound that can only come from a Beretta.

  “No!”

  “Wakey-wakey, schlubs!” Solomon jerked awake with a sudden pain as something stabbed into his arm.

  “Urk…” He gasped, coughed, and retched, but his stomach was empty, and his mouth felt terribly dry.

  Where am I? Where’s Matty?

  What did I do?

  Oh yeah… He was in a sleep tube, on his way to Titan to spend the rest of his days carving ice from the face of the frozen planet… Only he wasn’t.

  Solomon blinked, almost blinded by a harsh light from above. Hands were pawing at him.

  “Gerr off!” he tried to say, but the operator ignored him. He was lying on a bed, in a white room next to other people on beds, all groaning and sitting up and doing their best not to throw up. It looked like he was the last in line for the medical examiner—a woman with sterile-blonde hair and a facemask in a white lab-coat who was even now gripping his head in her surprisingly strong hands and moving his head back and forth.

  “Convict 7203. Conscious. No signs of embolism or stroke,” the woman’s voice, faintly Russian-sounding, cut through the noise. “Heartrate good, no major biochemical imbalances, an apparently high tolerance for pain…” the Russian voice considered as Solomon was poked and prodded. “Really, Warden, I have no idea why you tried to hide this one from us…”

  Hide? Whose hiding me, and from what? Solomon thought as the blonde Russian doctor let go of his head to remove the IV line from his arm to replace it with a spray-on bandage.

  “That one shouldn’t be here at all, Doctor Palinov. The department’s making a mistake…” It was the voice of Warden Coates, who was stalking across the end of the room as Solomon sat up and his head spun.

  “The Department of Justice and Defense doesn’t make mistakes, Warden Coates,” this ‘Doctor Palinov’ stated heavily, before sighing as if this was an argument that she would rather not be having. “Anyway, he and the others should be ready to begin training as soon as the sedatives wear off, although some might need longer than others… In fact, I advise exercise for their trace muscle wastage…” she was saying to someone.

  An annoyed bark of a cough from Warden Coates. “I see that I’m stuck with him then. But we’ll soon get them on their feet and ready!”

  Muscle wastage? Solomon thought as he looked down at his body to see that it was still in the gray suit and didn’t particularly look any different to what he had enjoyed before. How long have I been under?

  There was a ringing in his ears that he guessed must either be from the enforced sleep or whatever cocktail of drugs the doctor had been injecting them with, but there was also a curious lightness to his limbs. Wait… He rolled his shoulders, raised and lowered his arms. Yeah… There was something odd about this place, a little like being underwater—heavy and floaty at the same time. Reduced gravity?

  The answer was behind Coates, who had stopped in front of the large, wall-length window arching over his head. Outside, Solomon could see what could only be described as a blasted landscape of pale ochres, pinks, and creamy white. Fantastic rock ridges rolled like frozen water, delicately orange and pink and speckled with silver flashes like captured starlight. The ground was mostly white and blue, riddled with rocks. It looked frozen.

  Titan? Solomon thought.

  “Attention! Get on your feet, schlubs, when I’m talking to you!” the warden barked at them, but the movement to vertical appeared a little too much for some of the convicts, who stumbled and fell—a fraction slower than normal—to the floor. Solomon was determined not to show weakness in the face of this nasty little man and took his time easing off the medical gurney to stand by the side of his bed, feeling his heart pound.

  “Welcome to Ganymede, Outcasts…” Coates snapped, surprising Solomon.

  “Huh?” one of the women convicts said, a shorter Asian-Pacific woman with dark hair tied back in a loose knot, and with the creep of a tattoo riding up her neck to lick at her jaw. Yakuza. Solomon recognized the reptilian mark immediately.

  “I thought you said we were going to Titan,” the young Yakuza woman said uncertainly.

  “I don’t think I said anything of the sort, Convict Wen,” the warden corrected her. “You’re on Ganymede, at the Marine Training Base.” The details of the medical lounge around Solomon started to make sense. The industrial-plate lettering on the walls, the small insignia that he could see next to them and on Doctor Palinov’s lab coat: a tiny golden eagle, surrounded by stars.

  The Confederate Marines… Solomon thought. What under the dome of stars was he doing here?

  He knew that the Confederacy of Earth was nominally the only super-power left, but in reality, he also knew that the picture was much more complicated than that. The ‘Confederacy’ was a top-level, administrative alliance of the various old powers of Earth, who had amalgamated into various partnerships, unions, and confederations—as in the Asia-Pacific Partnership that covered historical China, the Korean peninsula, Japan, and the South Pacific islands.

  The Confederacy was supposed to be a way for all of the individual powers of Earth to continue their business of trying to get richer than each other, while at the same time exploring the new frontier of space. Earth had seeded itself to the near solar system at first, with colonies on the Moon, Mars, and a station outside of Jupiter. Just
this last century, their faster-than-light drives had made it possible to set up colonies on the distant Proxima Centauri, Trappist, and in half a dozen other star systems.

  The Confederacy, and its Marines, were a way for Earth to try and protect its putative colonies from the ravages of harsh environments—and the increasing attacks by rogue ships—as well as stake a claim on the fledgling interstellar nation.

  But Solomon also knew that the Confederate Marines spent most of their time locked in border disputes and cargo inspections when they weren’t trying to chase off the rogue raiding ships that various criminal gangs had managed to get airborne. They were a force that was just as likely to be pointing their weapons at their own Confederate members as they were out into the night.

  And what in all frack do they want with a bunch of criminals?

  “All the rest of the deported have continued on their mission to Saturn and the ice-mining mission on Titan, but for some of you, the Department of Justice and Defense, in its infinite wisdom, has decided you would be better suited to a new work rehabilitation program,” Warden Coates said sternly.

  Great, so not mining ice on Titan but on Jupiter’s moon of Ganymede instead? Solomon thought. Groggily, he looked around to see that there was only a handful of the convicts that he had shared the shuttle up the Shanghai elevator with. Not even ‘Duke’ 66 had made it here, apparently.

  “During your sleep, you were submitted to various medical inspections, and your case files—your criminal records, along with every scrap of data we could pull from Confederate archives about each and every one of you—” Did the warden’s eyes hover over Solomon for just a moment? “—have been assessed by our psychological profilers. You small, incredibly lucky few have been found to be the ones fit enough, both mentally and physically, to become members of the recently established Marine Expeditionary Force, or MEF, for short—more commonly known as the Outcasts.”