Aries Station hung in orbit above Callisto, a crumpled fragment of metal reflecting the sun against Jupiter's distant sea. The Renegade let his ship drift toward it, carried by momentum and orbital velocity. He had circled Callisto twice now, scanning Aries Station as he drifted by. There were ships there. Some he knew, some he didn't. Seeing as Aries Station was abandoned and unstable, there shouldn't be any ships there at all.
His Ghost floated at the control panel, a few inches from his right hand. She was as valuable and dangerous as the iron strapped to his hip. Years ago, he had rebuilt her shell from steel alloy cut from the hulk of a ship in the Reef. While she looked like a delicate star with a glowing, intelligent eye in the center, she was as tough as an axe head, with an intellect sharper than a razor.
"I'm detecting thirty-two vessels," she reported, her voice slightly modulated. "All different makes." She displayed a list on the ship's main screen. The Renegade studied them. Over half of them he recognized from other stations and moons. All salvaged, rebuilt, and outfitted far outside the law. Some craft had obviously been retrofitted by the Eliksni, and at least one had once been a Cabal Thresher. Not unlike his own ship, the Talion.
"This is the place," said the Renegade, checking his relative velocity. "We'll creep in and dock out back. Don't want them to get their wind up. Sensors?"
"Active," Ghost replied. "They're watching for spooks like us. I'm seeing coverage at both poles of the station and two at the equator."
"Execute a tumble," said the Renegade. "The motion will mark us as debris."
Ghost instructed the ship to fire a short, lateral blast from its docking jets. The ship began a slow, lazy spin, still traveling toward the station. The Renegade sat back and watched his instruments. He had nothing but time, so he pulled up the file Spider had given him.
Valuable stolen cargo, the tip said. Possible connection with the Shadows of Yor. Return the cargo for a hefty reward.
The Renegade never turned down glimmer. After all, it was the lifeblood of the system, a universal currency that not only traded among humans and aliens, it was programmable matter that could be turned into materials and weapons. Between his long, long hunts and needing to eat, the Renegade never had enough glimmer.
But more than that, the mention of the Shadows drew him. Cultists who worshiped death, he had long ago infiltrated their ranks and taken their knowledge. Now he hunted them, weeding them out before they could make new recruits. Because they recruited fast, preying primarily on young, idealistic Guardians.
The thought of Guardians going dark and turning on their own kind was a thorn in the Renegade's soul. He had seen it happen and still carried the scars. It wouldn't happen again on his watch. If the Vanguard would not move against them, then a Renegade would.
The tumbling ship entered the sensor screen. Nothing changed at the station: no ships fled, no alerts sounded. Their ruse was working, for now.
Gently, the Renegade fired the stabilizers at one percent, slowing the tumble until he brought his ship to rest against a broken docking platform. An asteroid had struck it at some point, crushing the platform against the side of the station. The Renegade grappled to a protruding pipe and drew his ship into the station's shadow. Once secured, he unbuckled and rose from his seat. "Stay hidden, Ghost."
She obeyed, disappearing in a swirl of blue sparks. Her dematerialized form was somewhere about his person. Sometimes she reappeared from a pocket of his suit, and sometimes she seemed to hide inside the space occupied by his body. When he had been younger, this had fascinated him. Now he barely gave it a thought. All that mattered was that she remain safe and out of sight.
The Renegade floated down the length of his ship to his supply lockers. There, he selected an old helmet he had picked up years ago from a Crucible trash heap. It still had the red and white Titan lion rampant on the side, by now much scratched and dented. All the Renegade cared about was the broad faceplate and its wide field of vision. He pulled it on and secured it to his suit. He confirmed with Ghost that he was vacuum-ready. Then he transmatted outside.
Carrying a magnetic grapple gun in one hand, he drifted along the station's wall, pulling himself along the debris toward the other end of the station, where the other ships were docked. Once he was past the debris, he grappled to the station's wall and slingshotted himself along it, flying like a bird in silence.
When he reached the docking arms and their flock of ships, Ghost said in his head, "Careful. There may be sentry AI."
The Renegade halted his rush and waited below the docking arms, breathing steadily. He had an hour of oxygen, and it did no good to work himself up and breathe too heavily.
"Sentries are at the far end of the dock, facing outward," Ghost said after a moment. "Door on your left."
The Renegade had sneaked in behind the automated sentries. Moving gently, so as not to alert them, he pulled himself up onto the docking arm and followed it into the station.
An open airlock awaited him. The Renegade stepped in with his teeth clenched. Airlocks were a great place for an ambush. You were blind until that inner door opened. His hand slipped beneath his poncho and rested on his iron, ready to draw and fire.
But no ambush awaited him. The airlock opened on a long hallway studded with doors. Light streamed across the passage from an open door. The Renegade floated inside, flipping off his oxygen and opening his helmet's filters. The atmosphere was stale, but breathable. It stank of old food containers and sweaty men. The Renegade peered into the lit room.
An auction was in full swing inside. A crowd of people in every type of environment suit jostled and pressed against each other, shouting bids at the auctioneer. The auctioneer floated above a raised platform with a flickering screen beside him. He currently displayed a salvaged Delta-class engine that was on offer. He already had bids in the hundreds of thousands.
The Renegade keyed the chin button inside his helmet. A battered heads-up display flickered to life beside his right eye. He silently instructed Ghost to load the details of the stolen cargo he was hunting. Ether tanks with a particular mark. Ghost parts. Casks of fermented liquid, procured at great cost.
"Ghost, hack that auctioneer's system and find his database. I need to know if any of this matches. Also, Shadows?"
"Three known members present," Ghost replied, flagging their outlines with red in his HUD. They were near the front of the room, a hundred feet away, and the crowd was too dense to risk an attack. The Renegade would bide his time, as he always did.
Ghost was an efficient hacker. In less than a minute, the auctioneer's database appeared on the Renegade's helmet screen. It was long and varied. Ship parts, luxury goods, data chips, black market Vanguard weapons, the list went on.
It wasn't until he reached the bottom of the list that the Renegade paused. The last item was, "Awoken child, female, ten years old."
It wasn't hard to imagine what space scum like this crowd might want with a child. It turned his stomach. He directed Ghost's attention to the entry with a thought. "Find her."
"That entry did worry me," she confided. "Already located. Two doors down. I'll drop a nav point on your HUD."
The Renegade backed out of the room and kicked off the doorway, gliding down the hallway toward the next door. It was locked and encrypted, but Ghost simulated the authentication protocols, and the door slid open. The Renegade slipped inside, his black and brown leather gear blending with the dim lighting.
The room was packed with crates and drums of goods, many secured under tarps, or locked with grav-levs to the floor and walls. His nav point flagged a particular crate beneath a tarp. The Renegade went to it, unhooked a corner of the tarp, and flung it back.
Beneath the tarp was a cage, the sort used to house Cabal warbeasts, with reinforced sides and bars. Inside this cage huddled a child in a thin envirosuit, the kind that Awoken children wore around their habitat stations in the Reef. She had no helmet. Her skin was so fair she was nearly white, instead of blue, and blue hair curled at her cheeks. Her eyes were soft glowing purple, and she stared up at the Renegade in terror.
"I'm here to rescue you," he said without preamble, investigating the lock. It was a disappointing conventional padlock that required a key. "Who has the key?"
"The big man with the round face," said the girl, her voice quiet and clear. "He said I was going to be a slave."
"Change of plans," said the Renegade. "I'm taking you back to the Reef. First, this lock is in my way." He dug into one of the pouches at his belt and produced a hot wire cutter. He flicked it on and let the blade heat until it glowed red-hot. Then he cut the lock with little effort and opened the door. "My ship is outside. Where's your helmet?"
"The man took it," said the girl, kicking off the floor and flying out of the cage. The Renegade caught her before she crashed into a steel drum of preserved fish.
The Renegade considered his options. An adult sized helmet wouldn't fit her small head. Gaps in a suit's seal meant near-instant death in the vacuum of space. But hunting for her proper helmet would take too much time. He had less than an hour before someone came to check the live cargo and found her missing. Knowing the sort of men who frequented these kinds of auctions, they'd want to drag her up in front of the crowd and sell her in person.
Then there was the matter of the stolen cargo he had come to recover. At least one of the ether tanks near the ceiling bore Spider's mark. The rest had been spray painted to conceal their marks of ownership, but at a guess, he'd assume they were Spider's, too.
"Transmat?" Ghost said in his mind.
The Renegade nodded. It was the only choice that made sense.
"Here's the plan," he said. "I'm going to transmat you to my ship. Trouble is, a high-frequency matter transfer at the amperage I need is going to set off alarms. I'm going to send you aboard and I want you to get in a locker and hide. There's oxygen masks in there. Find one, put one on. If there's shooting, there might be a hull breach, and I want you to survive. Understand?"
She nodded, eyes wide.
"Now," said the Renegade, "there's other stolen cargo I need to recover. Get hidden and wait. I'll be back."
"What if they kill you?" she asked in a small voice.
The Renegade grinned, even though she couldn't see it behind his helmet. "They're welcome to try. Now, brace yourself for transmat."
Ghost materialized and flew around the girl, tagging her for proper dematerialization. The girl clapped her hands to her mouth and watched Ghost fly, but she made no sound. Obviously she knew what Ghosts were, and that the Renegade was a Lightbearer. Maybe she'd trust him. Maybe not.
"We're at the edge of our ship's transmat range," Ghost informed her partner. "However, the station's transmat network is active. It's how they're shuttling cargo in and out. But using it will send an alert directly to the screen in the auction room."
"Rapid-fire transmat, then," said the Renegade. "Tag the cargo. We'll work fast."
As Ghost zipped to the ether tanks, the girl turned in place, her glowing eyes staring at the wall. "Someone's coming."
The Renegade checked his screen. Nobody was coming. The hall outside was empty. "Ghost?"
"Nothing on radar," she replied, but she worked faster.
The Renegade moved to guard the door, just in case. He didn't like the way the girl hung in place, staring at the wall as if she could see straight through it. Awoken had powers of second sight, sometimes, and he found that it was better not to question it.
The girl glanced up at Ghost and whispered, "Should I hide?"
"Stay where you are, honey," said Ghost in gentle tones the Renegade rarely heard. "I've already tagged your coordinates. You'll be safe in a moment."
On his helmet HUD, his motion tracker registered a human moving down the hall toward their room. So the girl did have second sight, then. The Renegade investigated the door's mechanism. The electronic lock would respond to whoever carried the key chip, and there was no manual override.
Well then, he'd have to invent a manual override. The hot wire cutter was still in his hand. He flipped it back on, and pressed the red hot blade into the electronics. It pierced through them with a fizz of electricity and a pop. His arm jolted with the shock, but he had been prepared for that.
The human outside reached the door. He fumbled with the controls, muttering confused curses. The Renegade waited.
The human retreated, probably to find help. The Renegade said, "How's it going, Ghost?"
"Almost done," she replied. "I'll send the girl first. What's your name, honey?"
"Aerith," said the girl.
"All right, Aerith, I want you to hold your breath and close your eyes. Count to three. When you reach three, you'll be on board the ship. Ready? Go!"
The Renegade didn't turn around, but he heard the electrical buzz of the transmat firing, and felt a swirl of disturbed air.
"Safely aboard," Ghost informed him, back to her business-like manner. "But the alert is live."
"Send the rest," he replied. "I'll hold the door."
Various crates and tanks left the room in more flashes of light and whooshes of air. Three men were coming back, moving quickly. When they reached the door, they threw down something that clanged in the hallway outside.
Blast it all. They had brought a portable transmat station. The Renegade considered various scenarios. He could shoot them as they appeared, but the gunshots would draw the worst kind of attention. Besides, he was here to stall, not murder everyone. Despite his reputation, the Renegade only killed known users of Darkness. The men here, while scoundrels and pirates of every description, had not committed the crime of serving the Darkness and worshiping at its feet.
He backed up to the empty cage, kicked the door shut, flipped the tarp back over it, and hooked it to the floor. Then he drew his gun and aimed it at the cage. When the men transmitted into the room, they saw the Renegade covering what they thought was their prisoner, and they froze.
He studied their faces, noting their identities. The round-faced man he recognized: Rod Bender, a notorious smuggler and con man. The other was an Exo painted midnight blue, his eyes shaded red. He wore nondescript armor under a tattered cloak and had no other distinguishing marks.
"Malphur," spat Rod Bender, turning the surname into a curse. "You got no business walking in here, screwing with a man trying to make an honest living."
"Kidnapping and slavery is honest?" said the Renegade. When both men made as though to move forward, he shifted his grip to the trigger on his hand cannon. "No closer or the kid gets it. It'll be a kinder fate than she'll get from the likes of you."
"Now Malphur, talk sense," said Rod with a whine in his voice. "You got no record of killing kids. You know you'd rather see her go to a good home. A good mama and papa? Not a bullet. That's cold."
"How much she bring you, Bender?" said the Renegade in a low voice. "How much they paying for slaves these days?"
"She's no slave!" Bender exclaimed, the whine in his voice rising. "She's one of those they call Watchers. Sees things before they happen. Hella valuable to an enterprising man. You want to place a bid?"
"I'm sure she'd rather die," said the Renegade, and squeezed the trigger.
As the conversation ended with the Last Word, Ghost transmatted the Renegade out of that crowded room, back to the safety of the Talion. The last thing the Renegade saw was that Exo swinging a spiked club at his head.
But the Renegade was out of reach for the moment. As he hurried to the cockpit, he called toward his storage lockers, "Come ride in the copilot seat. We'll be in near-lightspeed in five minutes."
One of the lockers swung open, and the glowing purple eyes of the girl peeked out at him. The Renegade ignored her and strapped himself into the pilot seat. Ghost materialized beside him and fired the thrusters, backing them away from Aries Station.
As the Renegade grasped the flightstick, Aerith slipped into the copilot seat and fumbled the flight harness into place. "Thank you," she said hesitantly. "For rescuing me."
"Don't thank me yet," said the Renegade. "They'll follow us. They know I'll take you back. Where are you from?"
Her voice trembled a little. "An orphanage in Interamnia."
"Then that's where you can't go," said the Renegade. "We'll go someplace safer."
As he fired the thrusters to maneuver away from the station, he felt his Ghost's touch of curiosity in the back of his mind. It was as if she had presented him a single question mark. What are you doing?
The Renegade didn't answer. There was no point in explaining he had no plan, yet. Plans came on their own. He needed information, and there were places to get it.