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Spoilers

Reaching Fortuna Standing "Old Mate" - MAJOR

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O Fortuna

Oh Fortune

Velut luna

Like the moon

Statu variabilis

You are changeable

Semper crescis

Ever waxing

Aut decrescis

And waning

Nunc obdurat

First oppresses

Et tunc curat

And then soothes

Ludo mentis aciem

As fancy takes it

Egestatem

Poverty

Potestatem

And Power

Dissolvit ut glaciem

You melt them like ice

- Carl Orff, O Fortuna -

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Case#DS3252019

24h 28m 24s

102,189c

Coolant Maintenance F-23: Married – 2 Dependents

Industrious and hardworking – Military history: Pluto

Discharged for the physical assault of a superior.

10 years hard labor Fortuna sumps.

Full-body repossession; debt passed to dependents.

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It was cold in the sumps.

It was always cold in the sumps.

Not the bone-cracking cold of the Orb Vallis, that eternal tundra with its forests of diseased fungi, nor the empty chill of fathomless space. The cold that lurked in the bowels of Fortuna was the kind that slowly filled your respirators with moisture, until every intake was through a coolant-soaked filter. The kind that crawled into every system and left your parts aching, flesh-bits slowly turning paler than the eyeless worms they sometimes pulled outta the coffers.

"I swear, mold'll grow down the crack of me ass if I ain't careful," Kade announced.

It was a good joke. Should've been funny, really, but Deric couldn't find the energy to laugh. He pressed against the back of the lift as the big man crammed in beside him, trying not to clock someone with the massive motherwrench he'd propped on one shoulder.

"Oi! Watch it there, mate," Tyche complained, giving Kade a shove – and accidentally popping Deric in the nether regions as she did so. She apologized immediately, but there were no hard feelings. The lift was cramped; Deric was glad his twig-and-berries had been removed after his last upgrade, otherwise he'd have spent more than one descent moaning it out in the fetal position. Kade hooked his fingers into the scissor gate and shut it with a clang, fastening the decrepit clamp. He punched the button for Deck 23 and the lift gave a sharp jolt, descending on shabby cables.

They weren't even halfway down and Deric could feel the condensation starting to gather on his rig. He took a deep, dry breath through his intakes – the last he was going to get until the end of his shift. Once, as he stood at the end of the hab trying to sneak a smoke, he'd thought the ice floes of Pluto had been cold. Now they sounded like a tropical vacation. It was all in his head, of course. Even with that icy, arcane sludge flowing through the pipes, the mercury in the sumps never dropped below the freezing mark, but it just felt colder somehow, even if he couldn't sort out why.

"Did you 'ere? Jed got back from one of them asteroids out in the Kuiper," said Tyche. "Says the Corpus mercmercs done given up on the ships out there, says they're crammed to the ceiling with zits! He said some other stuff, too, like voices comin' over the comms – Cephalons rambling on about bein' stranded out there in the black. Gives me the shivers just thinking about it!"

Kade leaned in, showing interest. Deric simply listened. He'd once stood at the edge of the known system, looked out into that endless, abyssal space, home to nothing save dwarf planets and drifting comets, and it'd frightened him. Not because he believed in the stories of monsters the size of asteroids plotting under the light of an alien star – even the Orokin weren't that advanced. Sentient machines; could you actually imagine such a ridiculous thing? Even antique Cephalons, the ones left over from the before the Downfall, couldn't actually think for themselves.

The few Ostrons that visited Fortuna brought tales to the contrary, but those folk, while certainly nice enough, were also a little too given to fancy, living on the fringe as they did. Cholesterol of the brain, maybe; all that fish oil couldn't possibly be healthy.

No, Deric had hated the edge of space because it'd been so unbearably empty. An entire system full of life, of conflict and struggle and things striving for the right to exist, and then suddenly… nothing. Just nothing. Even with the latest wyrm drives, it would take years just to reach the nearest star, and there were no rails that went beyond the outer terminus. You'd be completely and utterly alone out there, with nothing but the sound of your own pleading voice for company. Deric reckoned even a Cephalon might go mad from that. Gave him the shivers, too, quite honestly. He tried not to make comparisons between it and his near future.

You are behind on your premium.

To avoid repossession and/or brain-shelving, please pay the amount listed above in full. Need quick credits to cover that sudden emergency or a stint of bad luck? The Order of Profit provides fast loans to the faithful. You work hard and deserve better! Our installment plans can keep you on your shift.

Deric shook himself, trying and failing not to think about the message that'd appeared in his inbox yesterday morning, read to him in that terrible, would-be pleasant voice. He'd found an old fashioned hard-copy pinned to the door of their hab, too, but he'd hastily peeled that one off before Merrit could discover it and arranged an early shift with his floor boss; better to get outta the hab instead of lying around feeling sorry for himself. At the very least, the mite bit of extra cred wouldn't go to waste. Buy a little extra dinner for the kids some night, or fix that busted regulator that kept taking the furnace offline.

"You're awful quiet today, mate. Somethin' a matter?"

Kade was looking at him in concern. Deric flapped a hand at him. "Naw," he lied. "Just trying to clear the cobwebs outta me wetware. Couldn't sleep at all last night. Mucking brats an' their skeg."

That did the trick. Kade muttered something uncomplimentary and went back to his conversation with Tyche, who looked mighty tickled by the audience. Deric absently wondered how long it was going to take before she figured out that Kade was sweet on her. The big man was boisterous and loud, but not really one for long talks – especially if they didn't concern the latest bout televised from the Index, that off-world gambling arena where outworlders and Corpus executives got all shined up in zodian jewelry and virmink coats, payin' top cred to lounge in heated viewing boxes and watch folk from all over the system tear each other apart.

The lift reached the bottom of the shaft with a clang. Kade hauled the gate open and stepped out onto the dock, hoisting Tyche's toolbelt despite her halfhearted protests as she jogged to keep up with his massive stride. Even at this early hour, the sumps were packed with rigs, filling the air with a deafening cacophony of sound. Someone had a plasma cutter going high in the ductworks, throwing a kavat-tail of sparks that jumped and sizzled on the damp floor. Kade made it halfway across the dock before he turned around.

"Ding!" he shouted. "Deck 23: ladies' underpants, rusty pipes and assorted Orokin rubbish!"

Deric shuttered his optics a couple of times. "Right," he answered slowly. "Right, o' course. Sorry."

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The Memcor system failed that afternoon.

It was a decrepit piece of mucking crap, dating back some fifteen years to when the Corpus had first powered up the Orokin towers, inflating a pop-up tundra in the middle of a sulfuric firestorm. Even now it was hard to believe such a thing were possible. Deric had only a basic understanding of how the god-like technology worked – even the Corpus brainboxes didn't have much more to add, just a bunch of technical jargon to make themselves look smart – but it was plenty enough to know why the entire deck was imploding: some blockhead had cranked a valve shut at the end of the system, forcing hundreds of cubic tons of fluid to suddenly change direction. The resulting pressure wave had propagated through the system like a constipated shit, rattling the surge tanks and blowing every slip joint from there to Deck 30.

"Talk to me, Savuka!" Jericho's nasally voice buzzed in his comm. "Pressures are red-lining again."

"Muckit, I know! Give me five minutes!" Deric hollered back, his rig dripping with a combination of vaporized coolant and H2O. Crouched in a narrow trench deeper than he was tall, he barely had the room to extend both elbows, let alone wrestle the length of poly-pipe he was trying to reconnect. He swabbed one end with the gunky mixture of hot sealant, not caring about being neat. Gobs of it dripped into the icy water, swirling in psychedelic patterns as the endothermic reaction kicked in, driving its own little convection currents. Deric crammed the sealant dauber back into the jar, seized hold of the pipe, and heaved, trying to get the mucking thing to seat before the sealant dried.

Three scraped knuckles later, he'd crammed the pipe into its new collar. It was a tight fit; half an inch shorter or longer, and it never would've seated. Deric was good at his job. He'd adapted quickly to it after the fiasco on Pluto. Had to, otherwise the repo men would've come a helluva lot sooner. Deric slapped his comms, his hand a rainbow slurry of blood, purple primer and warm, blue sealant.

"It's together," he panted. "Give it a couple minutes, then turn it on slowly. You do anythin' more than creep that valve open and it's gonna blow."

"Head down the junction box three. There's another burst."

The man signed off without further acknowledgment. Deric ground his teeth, then stopped when he reminded himself he didn't have the creds to fix 'em when they cracked. Jericho could be a real prick, not the sort that did it deliberately mind you, but the daft sort who lived so deep in the vacuum chamber of his own ass that he usually couldn't tell when he was steppin' on the folks beneath him. Nothing to be done about that, unfortunately. There were worse bosses in Fortuna after all, and come tomorrow, none of them were going to be a problem.

Deric hauled himself out of the trench, his posterior hydraulics giving a painful howl that tugged on the flesh-bits they were still attached to. It would a tab of zydrate for him tonight. Didn't like taking the stuff; the mucking crap was highly addictive, though that didn't stop the Corpus bigwigs from doin' lines like it was going out of style. Life on the trading floor was stressful work, apparently. At least they didn't have to pay for it, Deric reflectively bitterly. Merrit got most of it from a friend.

He screwed the lid back onto his sealant can, gathered up his tools, and headed off in the direction of junction 3. In a way, the chaos was a good thing. Kept his mind off other, worse things – at least partially. Assuming this little sideshow didn't put them into overtime, he had another five hours left on shift, which gave him a little less than two hours after that to set his affairs in order. Either way his clock was running down, the repo notice circling his head like a hellish data-frag on loop. He forced it back with a mantra of his own.

He had a plan. A stupid mucking plan, but he had it, and he was going to get through this or die trying.

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It was late when they were finally let out.

Fortuna had no windows; even the uppermost levels, where huge industrial elevators opened onto the Vallis, had only one small, square aperture for ventilation and a few stray flakes of snow. During his previous visits, Deric had thought of that aperture as Fortuna's own miniature sun, so high and distant that its contours were almost lost in the neon-soaked gloom of the ceiling. That sun had gone dark when Deric hauled his aching body from the lift, carrying his tools in a sodden canvas bag. Venus was 58 days into its night-cycle and the orbital mirror wouldn't be in a position to catch the sunlight for another 12 hours.

The overhead displays let out a disruptive buzz, alerting the entire deck to lift their heads for a prerecorded message. Nobody did. Deric didn't see a single rig so much as glance in Nef Anyo's direction. Man thought he was inspirational. What a load of guts. The volume did seem to be turned down a notch, though, and the sound coming to Deric's audials was muddier than he was used to on Deck 14. Somebody's idea of petty rebellion, most like. Deric had heard stories about the floor-boss up here. Word was that she and Anyo had some real bad blood between 'em.

He also noticed it was warmer up here than in the sumps. Smelled better, too, on account of not being a collection box for the sludge that came oozing outta the towers. Byproducts of the terraforming process, they called it. Smelled like the insides of an infected cyst. Deric was glad he could turn his sniffers off when the time came to work with the awful stuff. The upgrade had cost him a pile of creds he didn't have, but it was the only way he could take on shifts in the lower levels. They'd needed the extension, and Jericho had needed another monkey.

Deric swiveled in place for a moment, scanning the concourse for some type of signage or indication on where to go. Having heard of the vendor only through hearsay, he'd expected her shop to be difficult to find. It wasn't. The grungy yellow billboard was more than a sufficient beacon – as was the racket emanating from it.

"GUNS GUNS GUNS! Kitguns! Get your mucking Kitguns here, better than you ding-dongs deserve! Wot? Zip it you! I ain't gotta be nice. KITGUNS, guaranteed to murder them's that need murdering!"

O-kay.

Deric cautiously approached the stall. The woman pacing agitatedly in front of her wares – presumably Zuud of Zuud's Murdererizers, as per the grimy billboard – was a battered Ricoh-Theta model, series 3 by the look of it. Cheap rig, bad struts, but otherwise stable. A good investment if you weren't doing any hard labor or facing down vaporized coolant. She looked up as Deric got closer, absently fretting with her hands as if she didn't have a clue on what to actually do with them. On second thought, "pacing" didn't really describe the motion. Twitching, on the other hand, took care of it quite nicely.

"You!" she barked. "Ain't seen you around here before. Come to buy a kitgun?"

Deric took a deep intake, then closed the remaining distance. "Yeah, that's right."

His optics roved over the rack of parts displayed on a nearby shelf. It was obviously meant to be a modular system, with the buyer choosing from a set number of individual parts, but Deric only knew how to fire a gun, not assemble one from a dozen mismatched components. His gaze quickly moved to another rack and its collection of preassembled wares. It was… a motley offering to be sure, with many having more in common with a welding iron than an actual weapon.

Deric fought back a surge of anxiety. His tour had taught him how to handle Deras and Lankas; he'd even had the opportunity to use an Arca Plasmor once – and once had been quite enough. The casing had been hot to the touch, warmed by the chunk of radioactive plutonium tucked deep into the weapon's guts. Couple years of that and even his cancer would've gotten cancer, but long story short, he'd been taught to handle real weapons, not a mishmash of weaponized components.

"Look, matey," Zuud interrupted gruffly. "If you're gonna stand there and stare in'ta space, take a mucking picture and do it back in your hab. I gotta close me shop 'ere!"

Deric was both chastised and annoyed. It wasn't his fault his shift had run long, and while he appreciated that everybody wanted to go home at the end of the day, there was a line between hurrying things along and being downright rude. Actively fighting the urge to use the woman's attitude as an excuse to call the whole mucking thing off, Deric squared his shoulders, putting a hand into the pocket of his coat. Payday was next week, and his credit chit didn't have much on it, but he was going to have to make it work.

"I need a semi-automatic. Something sturdy and..." he hesitated, then added, "and cheap."

"My guns ain't cheap!"

A loud burst of static emanated from Zuud's processors.

"I know what he meant- no, you shaddup. Fine, fine! You putting her together yourself?"

"Um… no?" Deric answered warily.

"Didn't think so. Here. Feel this one. Good firepower, decent accuracy. Whatcha think?"

She picked up one of the kitguns and shoved it at him. Deric quickly took it with both hands, wincing as the scabs across his knuckles opened again. Despite its length and relatively thin construction, the weapon was much heavier than it looked and bore every indication of being handcrafted, its surface sloppily painted and pockmarked with the telltale divots of ball-peen hammer. Deric got a good grip and lifted it to his shoulder, giving the weapon a good shake. It rattled, but didn't shiver. Despite their shoddy appearance, the components were good and tight.

"Good magazine capacity," Zuud continued, picking grease out from beneath a coral fingernail. "Pull the trigger fast as you can and she'll keep up, I guarantee ya."

Deric eyed the clouds of blue paint splattered across the weapon. "How much?"

"2,000 cred."

Deric all but choked. "2,000," he mouthed slowly. "That… that's a lot."

"An' it takes a lot of my time," Zuud countered. "I ain't running a second-hand shop here, matey. These are premium-crafted kitguns, not toys fer your sprogs to run around with playin' Tenno! Buy it or shuffle on."

Deric felt his systems heat with embarrassment, his intakes whirring to compensate for the spike in temperature. 2,000 cred would pay for a month of food for Corbin and Elli, or half that number in hab rent. Torn by the indecision, Deric could only stand in silence, trying to haul air through coolant-soaked filters. In them, he could taste the hot iron of solder. That would be his o-rings breaking down again, he reckoned. 2,000 cred would go a long way towards repairing them, too.

You're gonna get repossessed tomorrow afternoon, he reminded himself desperately. You go and that 2,000 cred ain't gonna amount to more than a spit in the bucket. You got one last chance to get out from under here, take everybody outta this hellhole.

There was another audial-piercing blast of static from Zuud. To Deric's extreme discomfort, the woman reached up and roughly smacked an open palm against the side of her head. "I know it's a big decision," she hissed, canting her body away as if holding council with an invisible adviser, "but we all gotta make decisions, now don't we? What? Oh, that's rich comin' from you!"

The static hissed and chattered. Zuud clocked herself in the head again.

"Oh, very well, very well. If only so I can pack up and get some muckin' sleep! You, stranger- 1,800 cred for the kitgun. That's as low as this puckered arse's gonna talk me down, so take it or leave it. And be quick about it, eh?"

"Okay," Deric relented. "Eighteen hundred."

Zuud stuck out her hand. "Chit?"

Deric passed her the corrugated square of metal and waited while she swiped it through an antiquated reader, cussing and thumping on it about as much as she did her own rig. She obviously had a short somewhere in her wetware, Deric concluded uncomfortably. After a minute, Zuud returned the chit and snatched the kitgun, taking it aside to a workbench where she began to wrap it in damp brown paper. Deric dropped his hands back down to his sides, forcibly reminding himself that she wasn't going to elope into the vents with it.

"Guess what just came in," a new voice called, the singsong words accompanied by the bright, glassy rattle of someone shaking a bottle of nail lacquer. "Night Drive; just the color you've been looking for, or so I've been told. What are you doing still cooped up down here?"

"Tryin' ta get rid of me last customer, that's what," Zuud grumbled, fighting a tangled ball of twine. "Believe me, I know what time it is, so go an' buzz off! And tell that Eudico I don't need a muckin' fashion adviser, 'specially not from the likes a you. You're a mucking distraction, what you are!"

"You know Ticker's the best kind of distraction, luvvie," the man laughed, not in the least bit put off by Zuud's lack of manners. He was an Eos-V50 model with a dark blue paint job, his voice a wonderfully fruity drawl. Deric awkwardly twitched his head at the newcomer, not wanting to seem rude. There seemed to be enough of that in the air right now. After another moment of battling a pair of dull shears, Zuud shoved a messily wrapped package into Deric's chest. He hastily clamped both arms over it to keep it from dropping to the floor.

"Thanks," he muttered.

He could feel the V50's eyes – Ticker's eyes – upon him, and he didn't like the feeling. For one insane moment, it was if the man could see straight through his carapace and look at all the worries keeping him up at night, fluttering around his wetware like moths trapped under a bell jar.

"Been fancying a bit of mercenary work?" Ticker asked.

"Uh, no. Not really," Deric answered. Knee-jerk reaction, that. What else was he supposed to say?

He could almost feel Ticker squint at him. When he spoke again, his voice had gone terribly soft, like a warm, wholly unwelcome blanket he was offering to drape over Deric's shoulders.

"Listen to me, stranger," he said quietly. "Whatever you're plannin' to do with that, don't go through with it. Ticker's seen folks like you, standing 'round with that look in their eye – then Ticker never sees 'em again. Trust me when I say it never works out, not the way you want it to."

Deric bristled, his momentary embarrassment disappearing under an indignant surge of anger. "Stay outta me affairs," he snapped. "I didn't ask for your advice, and it's none of your mucking business! Next you'll be telling me ta take out another loan from the Order, or- or sell one of me sprogs. Tell Nef Anyo he can wrap his lips around me twig!"

The words blurted from his mic before he had a chance to catch them. Honestly, he didn't know why so much had come out of him in such a short time – it was far more than he'd wanted to say, and leagues from the terse "go bugger yourself" he'd wanted to deliver. Gathering up his tool bag, Deric turned on his heel and walked away as quickly as he could, his systems burning with suppressed fury. He was a good father and a good husband. He didn't need some smooth-talking ambidexter telling him how to take care of them.

If he'd been in a more observant mood, or had bothered to turn around and chastise Zuud's inappropriate snort of laughter, he might have noticed the figure crouched high in the baffles, occasionally illuminated by the rain of sparks trickling down from above.

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It was a long walk back to Deck 14.

The lift had broken down weeks ago and so far, nobody had cared enough to fix it, leaving the flow of rigs to circle around through the emergency stairwells. They were lucky they had those. Couple of the lower decks didn't have any such accouterments, and it'd cost more than a few folks their lives when fire had broken out down there a couple of years ago.

Two floors down, and Deric pushed his way out of the stairwell. He and his fam had lived on Deck 14 since they'd come to Fortuna, and he knew the cramped streets well. Crisscrossing wires had been strung between the three-story habs, strung with sodden work tunics and puffy, padded jackets that stirred in the lukewarm air chugging out of the vents. Deric's sniffers could barely detect anything through the clammy pleats of his filters, but that didn't include the ammonia of stale piss. Some of the habs didn't have running waste disposal units, so a few occupants simply urinated in the gutters that ran parallel to the concourse, sending their morning gifts down to the sumps where Deric would, inevitably, come into contact with one or two molecules of it.

Still, the place was home – and a far better one than some. In the thirty minutes since he'd left the kitgun vendor, Deric's anger had cooled. It simply wasn't worth hanging on to, and he certainly wasn't about to let his family's last memory of him be a picture of sour, impotent rage. He turned left at the end of the corridor and headed down a side passage. He knew he was home when he came to the hab with the plastid flower potted outside in an empty lubricant can. Deric tapped his wrist against the lock, let it read his ink, then stepped through the open door, every hydraulic bracing, every aching flesh-bit coiling into readiness.

"Dada!"

He dropped the tool bag just in time to catch the speeding toddler that came powering at his legs, picking her up by the back of her coveralls. "Arggh, you got me again! I can't sneak past you! Come'ere – spaceport control, this Savuka Rail requesting permission to depart. Psshhhhhhhh!"

He blew a long raspberry in mimicry of an engine as he hoisted the squealing girl into the air, bobbing and weaving her through the narrow hallway towards the kitchen, careful not to clock either of her outstretched arms against the door frame.

"Oh, no! Asteroids!" He started to lightly judder his sprog by her suspenders. "Daddy to bridge, she can't take much of this, Captain! We're going down! Mayday, mayday!"

Swooping her past the nutrient preserver, he plonked Elli down in her highchair and planted a kiss on her giggling head. "Evening, munchkin," he said as she tried to wind sticky fingers into his hydraulics.

"Evening," said his wife's voice.

Deric untangled Elli's tiny hands from his lines and turned to find Merrit standing by the oven, her tired face illuminated by the same warm smile she always wore when he joshed with the kids. She opened her arms for him, and Deric made his way over to give her a hug. The argument about his filthy clothes was an ancient battle, and one that he'd had been routed from on numerous occasions. Tonight it wasn't worth raising the flag.

"You're late," Merrit commented softly. "They make you do overtime?"

"Ain't even the half of it," Deric groaned. "Some useless bugger cranked a valve shut and sprung the whole damn system! I had coolant raining on me head like we was on Earth!"

Merrit planted a kiss on his rig. "Go get changed. I'll warm up dinner."

Deric obediently headed towards the wash-rack. Elli's stuffed bear, the one Merrit had painstakingly sewn out of one of Deric's old jackets, was on the floor where the precocious toddler had dropped it on her way to the door. Deric picked it up and sat it on the table.

"Hey, dad," Corbin mumbled without looking up from his numbers. He was nine, and anything his father did was viewed as mortal embarrassment. It made for endless hours of entertainment, far as Deric was concerned. He dropped a hand onto the boy's head and scuffed, earning a scrunched face and an attempt to wiggle elsewhere. Deric let his hand linger, however, feeling the boy's fine hair stick to the grime on his fingers. Corbin had been he and Merrit's first. His first breath had been the clean, scrubbed air in the medbays of Thanatos Station, not damp pollution rich with the stench of coolant, as Elli's had been. Unfortunately, that discrepancy in good fortune was beginning to show. Ellie was an energetic child, but woefully small for her age, and as pale as the snow on the Orb Vallis.

"Daaaad," Corbin whined, trying to shrug him off. "Your hand stinks."

Deric huffed a laugh, and let his hand fall.

He cleaned up in the narrow wash-rack in the back of the hab, allowing the grease and filth from the day to wash away down the drain – returning to the sumps for him to deal with in the morning. No, he corrected himself, scrubbing his bare arms with a pad. There would be no more days in the sumps. One way or another, he was never going to see that place again.

He switched his filters out for dry ones and inhaled the familiar scent of the hab, of powdered cleanser and the oily char of grilled tralok wafting in from the kitchen. Actual meat, especially from distant Earth, was grievously expensive in Fortuna, but he and his wife were glad to make the sacrifice at least once a month. Corbin and Elli were still growing, and any meat harvested from the Vallis was just… off, somehow. It was certainly affordable, but Deric had taken one look at the strange, golden veins snaking through that slab of pobber and decided there and then, he wouldn't be feeding it to either of his sprogs. Period.

Deric changed into a thin pair of pants and made his way back into the kitchen, where Merrit was cutting the tralok into small pieces and putting them into a plastic bowl. Elli was old enough to eat without having to be bribed by a motor-boating spoon, but it was essential that she didn't choke. Corbin was already halfway through his filet, eating with a gusto that simultaneously made Deric both proud and a little worried, hoping the boy was getting enough calories. Nutrient pills could only make up so much of his diet.

He sat down at the small table and made small talk with a reluctant Corbin as he noisily chewed on his fish and complained about the difficulty of his numbers. Merrit set a warm can of nutrient paste in front of him and Deric gratefully hooked it to his systems, sighing a little as the nourishing sludge trickled through his rig. Heating it was completely unnecessary, as was whipping it for several minutes with a fork, but Merrit did it every time.

"So, the pipes blew up?" Merrit prompted, sitting down next to him. There was a plate of nutrient paste in front of her, too, but with her body intact, including all the digestive bits, she had the option of mashing it with grease from the empty tralok skillet.

"Sky high," said Deric, trying to get Elli to hold a spoon.

He could smell something else now; the rich aroma of cardamom and nutmeg, filtering like warm autumn sunlight through a forest of rosewood and black mountain teak. Deric's entire body tightened with heartache. Might even have got his twig to stir, too, if that particular flesh-bit had still been there. Merrit had worn the rare, expensive scent when he'd first met her on Thanatos Station, a perfectly pressed, Corpus accountant in turquoise stilettos. When the good times had come crashing down in flames, she'd brought the tiny, half-empty bottle to Fortuna wrapped in a pair of socks, wearing it only on special occasions such as New Years and Void Day.

Deric wondered why she was wearing it now.

The evening wore on, filled with laughter and small talk, and the sound of Elli trying to babble new words that Deric tentatively translated as fishy and blue. He helped Corbin with his numbers, and regaled them all with Tales from the Sumps and the hordes of alligators that lived there. He was stalling, waiting for the sprogs to start to fall asleep, and Merrit knew it. She pulled Elli out of her highchair and rocked her until she dropped off, drooling onto her mother's shoulder. Corbin took a little longer, but eventually, when he was told to pack up his datapads and crawl into his cot, the boy offered only a token argument.

Taking Elli, Deric carried her and the bear into the back room she shared with her brother, tucked them both in, and shut the door behind him when he left. When he returned to the kitchen, Merrit had lit a cheap tobacco stick.

"And how was your day, Miss Dahl?" he teased, wearily sitting down next to her.

"Pack it up and move on, Savuka," she responded in kind, smiling at him. It was a tired joke, something worn shabby through repeated use, but neither of them felt like tossing it out. Its threadbare familiarity was too much of a comfort.

They talked for a while, keeping their voices low as not to wake the kids. More stalling, and the both of them knew it. When the act stretched too thin, the Deric took a deep intake, his guts tangled up in his vents. "I got a repo notice yesterday morning," he managed finally, the words utterly devoid of emotion.

Merrit snubbed her cigarette into the oily basin of her plate.

"I know," she said quietly. "I saw the one on the door."

Oh.

They sat in silence for a long moment, each submerged under the weight of their own thoughts. "I comm'd industrial management before I left this morning," Merrit continued. "They're still taking people for Europa. I downloaded you a form."

She trailed off, her intonation rising into an obvious question. Deric shook his head. "Why?" he asked shortly. "So I can bust me hump for a couple more months, have them garnish whatever wages I do earn, then get shipped off to repo anyway? Naw."

He shook his head again, as if to reinforce the decision. Getting up from the table, he went to his tool bag in the hall and took out the wrapped kitgun, bringing back to the kitchen.

"I bought this today," he explained, striping the paper off and setting the weapon on the table, where its burnished silver parts gleamed in the smoky air.

Merrit's eyes widened. "Deric, no," she protested in a horrified whisper. "You can't fight the taxmen!"

"Ain't gonna fight the taxman," he reassured her softly, sitting back down with the gun between them. He took another deep intake. "I'm going to enter the Index."

There was a terrible, protracted silence. Merrit's brown eyes were tired, Deric noticed, and deep, careworn lines were starting to carve their way into her face. Fortuna had little work for those that didn't have a rig, and being unmodded save for a few somatic implants that let her interface with the Corpus datanet, Merrit had been forced to scrounge for whatever odd jobs were available, such as cleaning habs and babysitting other people's sprogs. The hours were small, and the pay even more terrible than what he got working in the sumps.

Deric reached across the table for her hand. "Merrit…" he began quietly, but she cut him off with a desperate flutter of her hand.

"You can't," she objected weakly. "The Index, it- it's full of killers, mucking buggers who train to rip people apart! You know the type of thugs Anyo throws in there. You wouldn't last a single round!"

"I know how to fight," Deric reminded. He patted the kitgun with his other hand. "It don't look like much, I know, but it's a good gun. I've shot down Grineer with worse."

Merrit shook her head frantically, her cloud of dark hair floating with the movement. "You had other men with you. With shields and better equipment! That's a different story that some- some pit filled with murderers!"

"I don't have another option, Merrit," said Deric. "The repo men are coming tomorrow night. Whether I die in the Index or get brain-shelved, it's the same thing. I'm gone either way, and you and the kids are stuck picking up me debt."

"We can get you back from brain-shelving!" Merrit burst out, her voice rising. There was a soft noise from the back room and they both froze, listening hard for the patter of tiny feet, but after several moments, there was nothing but silence. Merrit took a shaking breath.

"We can get you back," she repeated desperately.

"Hon, you know that's never gonna happen," Deric countered gently. "How many people do you know that got pulled back from shelving? Even if I get outta there, it'll be to say hello to me grand-sprogs – and that's assuming they don't tear the kids apart before they get a chance to have any. They're taking organics now, too. Hearts, kidneys, the whole mucking bag."

Merrit let out a thin moan and dropped her face into her heads. Deric gently put his arms around her quivering body, lifting his shutter so he could look at her with his own eyes. "If I win in the Index, it'll be more than enough to clear me debt," he told her encouragingly. "Even a win in the first round will keep me outta repo, and we'll have a nice chunk of creds. I can do this! You don't deserve to get hauled down with me anymore."

"I hauled myself," she choked, reminding him of the fact that when the court martial had come down, she'd packed her bags, picked Corbin up in her arms, and left a life a luxury to follow her disgraced husband to the armpit of the system. Deric had begged her not to, but she wouldn't be convinced.

"That you did," he relented tenderly. "Me time's up, Merrit. Either I try the Index, or I sit on the stoop an' wait for the repo men. And ya know what? I'd rather take me chances in the Index, maybe take one or two of them corporate buggers out with me, yeah?"

Merrit nodded into his carapace and he stroked her hair with a one hand, savoring the mélange of spice that wafted into his filters. "Thanks for wearing your perfume tonight," he croaked, his voice cracking despite doing his damnedest to prevent it.

"You're welcome," she sniffled, then collapsed into gentle sobs.

Later, they lay together on the narrow bunk they shared adjacent to the kitchen, Merrit curled low so she could rest her face next to his open hatch, a ratty blanket folded around her to soften the edges of his carapace. She'd finally gone to sleep, but Deric was still wide awake, staring the pattern of water damage on the dark grey ceiling. He was glad his arms were still living flesh, so that he could feel the steady rise and fall of her breath. She told him constantly that his carapace was quote "absurdly comfortable" despite the hard, jutting planes of it, but Deric suspected that she only said it to make him feel better.

Long ago, it'd just been a couple of hydraulic actuators in his back and shoulders to help him heft a gun. The debt had been trivial, nothing he couldn't pay off with a military man's salary – but all that had changed the night Captain Irohn had cornered his wife in an empty cubicle. She'd been waiting for Deric to pick her up after his shift, but the captain hadn't known that, assuming she was completely alone. After the trial, Deric had been lucky to escape Pluto with his discharge papers and a sentence to Fortuna.

He tucked a hand into the small of Merrit's back, fingers between her waistband and skin, feeling the lassitude of zydrate stealing over his aching body. Tonight he had to sleep, because tomorrow he needed every scrap of energy to save his own life.

He'd been lying to Merrit about his chances in the Index. Anyo's pit fighters were some of the meanest bastards in the system, specially picked to be without a conscience and eager to turn a profit for the corporation – because Anyo turned a big profit out on that distant, frozen world. Blood-sport was a lucrative business, and the lure of a big payday attracted every sort the system had to offer: ex-convicts, debt slaves, scarred Ostron veterans who'd won a dozen campaigns against the Grineer. Sign-up was open to all, even those about to go into repo. Especially those about to go into repo. Anyo loved the desperate ones most of all, even gave them extra incentive to enter. Some had gone in with the best of equipment, the deadliest zaws...

And only a handful ever survived to collect their prize.

Deric pinched his eyes shut, tears rolling silently down his face. After a long time, he drifted to sleep alongside his wife, listening to the muffled clamor of skeg echoing down the vents. He'd told Kade the sound kept him up at night. That'd been a lie, too.

He liked the homemade music, because it reminded him that even the unluckiest folk of all, the sprogs with nobody to care for them in the entire system, were determined to make the best of things.

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Deric awoke early and dressed without a word. There was enough left in in their shared cred account to buy him a tractor ticket to Neptune, which he purchased over the net while Merrit silently warmed a tube of nutrient paste. They ate in silence, too, out of words and little platitudes of comfort to offer each other. Deric put the kitgun in a dingy tote, then went into the back room to kiss his children goodbye. The stuffed bear had fallen to the floor again. Deric picked it up and put it back under Elli's blankets.

"If I don't come back, scrape together whatever you can and get you and the kids on a tractor for Earth," he instructed Merrit. "Them Ostrons are good people. Little weird, but good, and it'll be a better life for you than Fortuna. Anyo won't come after me debt until Corbin turns sixteen, and by then he might have a good job – fishing or smithing, or whatnot. Don't you let him get any upgrades."

Merrit nodded mutely. Her eyes were swollen and red, but there were no more tears. She'd used them all up the previous night. "I won't have to worry about that. You'll be coming back, remember?" she told him.

"'Course I will! But ya know… might be a while." He opened his front shutter. "Give me a kiss, yeah?"

Merrit bent and kissed him full on the lips. "I love you."

"Love you, too."

He opened the hab door into the street and stepped on something hard, foreign and wholly unexpected sitting on his mat. Cursing and flailing his arms, thinking he'd narrowly avoided squirting a pobber's guts out its ears, Deric staggered until he could right his balance, then stared at the offending artifact. It was a flat envelope sealed with a daub of golden wax, its surface deeply embossed with some nameless flower. Beneath it was a line of brush-script so smooth and elegant, Deric almost mistook it for Orokin letters, like those he found stamped into their ancient machinery.

Deric Savuka

"Deric?"

Merrit put her head out the door. Wasn't half a second before she noticed the envelope, too.

"What's that?"

"Bugger me," said Deric, easing his tote to the ground. Moving slowly, he picked up the envelope and held it up. It was made of thick parchment and fiendishly dense for its size. Inside, something metallic shifted and slithered. More confused than ever, Deric pushed a finger beneath the flap and slit it open, breaking the wax seal and dumping the contents out into his palm. Half a second later, he nearly fumbled them to the street.

"Deric?" Merrit prompted, seizing his arm. "Deric, what is it?"

He showed the thick, triangular chits to his wife. Each one of them had been laser-etched with his name and serial, and something else, too. A bold stamp across the red inner ring that read simply: VOID.

"Me debt bonds!" Deric exclaimed, his voice shaking, knowing then – as all the wretched of Fortuna knew – that there was no way to acquire the precious things unless the debt indicated had been paid in full. "Me mucking debt bonds! Everything we owe- they're... it's all… Merrit, our kids, they're-"

"Free," Merrit whispered tearfully.

Deric threw his free arm around his shaken wife. Inside his shutter he was laughing and crying at the same time. He glanced up and down the street, searching for a glimpse of whoever had forgotten the envelope, because surely it hadn't actually been meant for him- but no. No, someone had to have written his name, but who could have done such an impossible thing? None of their friends or shift-mates, that's for certain. The Temple preached against charity, but even if somebody had been so inclined, most couldn't even pay off their own debts, let alone lift the burden from another. Here in Fortuna, nobody just gave. Sad fact of life was that not a single person breathin' would let their own dependents go hungry payin' off another's debt.

Merrit went to her knees on the stoop and Deric sunk down with her, the enveloped bunched tight in his fist and the price of his life tumbling to the mat in a series of heavy thuds. Useless now, mere symbols of debt once owed, scattered on the damp cement.

"Thank you," Deric whispered to the gloom. "Aw, sweet Void. Thank you."

He didn't expect his gratitude to be heard, but once again, if he hadn't been so distracted, a glance upwards might have revealed the shadow from Deck 9, partially hidden in the gloaming dusk, waiting to see if the envelope had been noticed by the proper recipients. Seeing that task accomplished, the figure turned and left, moving through little-used service elevators and dripping, narrow passageways until it'd made its way back to the upper floor. There it walked across the concourse without bothering to hide its gleaming skin, the blue light of the Void shining through the crevices in its armor.

High in his loft, Ticker was rolling out the day's inventory, stopping to crack the knot that was starting to trouble his lower back these days. Out of the corner of his optics, he saw the lone figure walk into the cargo elevator without looking back, disappearing in a swirl of ice kicked up by the powerful doors. Somewhere below, Ticker knew there was happiness; the happiness of good people who'd just found out they were going to see another day.

Ticker had recognized the majesty and excruciating, unnatural beauty of the Warframe the minute it'd set foot in Fortuna, but to be honest, he'd never expected that beauty to encompass their soul as well – because Ticker had seen too much cruelty inflicted by the Corpus autocracy, heard too much of the suffering that'd soaked into the very bones of Fortuna, to believe in the tales of benevolent Orokin. They'd been gods in their own right, the proof of that was just outside, but that kind of wealth poisoned the soul, made it ugly and twisted, no matter how beautiful the carapace. The Tenno were not like the decayed, golden gods that'd created them.

They were better.

"You're doin' good, Stardust," Ticker murmured softly. "You're doin' good."

Above his head, enough hours had passed for the orbital mirror to finally catch the light of Sol, sending soft beams of light down to mingle with the neon. Ticker watched the drifting flakes of snow for a moment, seeing how the light gleamed and sparkled inside each one. Below his alcove, the day's shift was just kicking into gear, filling the deck with new life: plasma cutters, hammer drills, the footfalls of a dozen rigs heading to their assigned tasks. Ticker hummed a little in the back of his throat. He usually didn't sing along with those on the concourse below, preferring to listen to the familiar tunes that made the back-breaking labor a little more bearable. There was precious little to celebrate, but damn, Ticker felt like celebrating it anyway.

"Shadows fall, and hope has fled.

Steel your heart, the dawn will come…"

One level directly below, the Business was trying to coax a particularly strong and agitated virmink into a crate. Hearing the warm voice come floating down to him, the big man stopped and listened. Man had such a wonderful signing voice. Was a pity he didn't use it more often. Biz hooked his thumbs over the controls on his rig, loosening his brawny shoulders. He knew that tune; an old one from… from a very long time ago. Clearing his intakes with a little cough, the Business absently began to follow along. His own singing voice was rusty and maybe a little lacking in melody, but perfection wasn't the point.

"The night is long, and the path is dark.

Look to the sky, for one day soon.

The dawn will come."

Eudico cocked her at the song drifting across the deck. Was that Biz? Certainly wasn't one of their usuals, but it felt good to hear despite the way it pulled at her heart like a bad weld. Things were gonna be different this time, she told herself, and for the first time in a long time, she actually believed it. She sat down in her usual spot, aware that the sound was rising in volume. Couple of the jockeys bangin' away on the concourse knew the words and had picked up the melody, adding the weight of their voices. Eudi scrounged her memory banks for the lyrics and decided to join in – because muckit, it would be better this time.

"Bare your blade, and raise it high.

Stand your ground, the dawn will come!"

The voices rose and rose, gaining in tempo and strength, until they drifted out of Fortuna and across the Orb Vallis, defying the lot they'd been given and promising hope for a better tomorrow.

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I had an amazing amount of fun with this one! Don't forget to visit my DeviantArt page for illustrations, and search "Freya Catherine" in YouTube for her version of The Dawn Will Come, right alongside her stunningly beautiful cover of We All Lift Together.