Silent Order: Axiom Hand Read online

  It had taken only an hour to get the ship loaded at Constantinople Station, but it took the better part of a three and a half days to get the Tiger’s cargo loaded onto the shuttle to the surface.

  The first thing March saw when he disembarked was a video from the Information Section of the Renarchist Republic playing on the wall over and over. It explained that thanks to the triumph of modern robotics and Renarchist ideology, mankind had been liberated from the drudgery of common labor, and the unloading systems aboard Rustaril Station were fully automated. Visitors were invited to marvel at the miracle of Rustari technology, and to consider taking the wisdom of Renarchist ideology back to their respective home worlds.

  The unloading drones broke down five times over those three and a half days, and every time March had to wait two or three hours for technicians to arrive from station control to cudgel the ancient unloading drones back into life. March had expected to waste an enormous quantity of valuable time on Rustaril Station, and he passed the time as he did in hyperspace, exercising and performing maintenance on the Tiger’s systems. He made sure to explicitly refuse permission for the station’s technicians to do any work whatsoever on the Tiger while he was on Rustaril. Given the level of incompetence and sloth endemic on Rustaril Station, likely some idiot would try to refuel the ship and wind up causing an explosion.

  At last, the cargo shuttle was loaded, and March walked through the gloomy corridors of the station to the shuttle’s docking bay, carrying a backpack with a computer and spare clothing. The atmosphere was tense, with long lines standing at each docking bay, and angry freighter crewers shouting at flustered station officials and technicians. None of the station personnel, March noted, were Rustari Citizens or Administrators, but were instead outworlders hired from various mercenary companies. Which didn’t surprise him, since he couldn’t see the Citizens agreeing to work on a space station, and he suspected that the Rustari Administrators became Administrators specifically to avoid doing any real work.

  He boarded the passenger deck of the shuttle and took his place amongst several dozen irritated freighter captains and crewers. Fortunately, no one was in the mood to talk. March seated himself and checked the emergency breath mask he had packed. Given the generally low quality of maintenance aboard Rustaril Station, he didn’t want to take a chance with the shuttle losing life support.

  Fortunately, after the delay getting the cargo unloaded, the flight from the station to Rustaril and Rykov City’s spaceport proved simple. Three hours and some atmospheric turbulence later, the shuttle landed at Rykov City, and March and the other passengers disembarked.

  The concourse outside the shuttle was worn down, the carpet faded. Half the lights in the ceiling were out. Enormous screens covered the walls, each one showing heroic scenes of Rustari Citizens building mighty industries or constructing starships or planting vast fields. The contrast with the shabby-looking spaceport and a half-dozen gaunt Administrators in their gray government uniforms was noticeable. A scarecrow-like Administrator approached March, a thick tablet computer cradled in his left arm, a stylus in his right hand, and a sour expression on his face. March spent twenty minutes answering questions and having his identification documents examined, but since his reason for visiting Rustaril was completely legitimate, the Administrator let him pass, though warning him yet again to follow all local laws and not to proselytize in the name of the Royal Calaskaran Church or any other religion.

  March spent another two hours after that at a local computer terminal at a spaceport kiosk, arranging for the delivery and pickup of his cargo. Once that was finished, he decided to make his way to Jacqueline Tolox’s office. Tolox owned a warehouse and a repair shop for her vending-machine business, and according to Censor, she operated out of that building. Censor had also arranged for one of March’s cargoes to be a load of machine parts for Tolox’s business, so he had an excellent cover story for visiting her warehouse.

  Several autocabs were available, but March decided to bypass them. It was only five kilometers from the spaceport to Tolox’s building, and March decided to walk. It was a short distance, and it would let him take a quick look around Rykov City and see if Rustaril had changed much since his last visit.

  Unfortunately, it had not.

  March was the only person afoot as he walked from the spaceport, making his way past the various taverns and bars and restaurants that catered to freighter crewers. The sky was a dull, overcast gray, and against the clouds rose the skyline of Rykov City’s massive apartment blocks. Each Citizen of the Renarchist Republic received an apartment from the government, though to judge from some of the craters and scarring on the apartment buildings, the apartments were not in good shape, and March knew the Rustari government regularly covered up news of shoddy construction and collapsed buildings.

  Perhaps that was why there were so many Citizens and their Companions on the street.

  The Rustari Citizens were easy to identify. The Administrators tended towards the gaunt since Renarchist ideology mandated a vegetarian diet for the truly devoted Renarchists. The Citizens of Rustaril had no such limitation and the smallest Citizen that March saw, whether man or woman, had to weigh at least four hundred pounds. All the Citizens drove in their own personal electric carts, all provided by the government, and the steady rasp of their treads against the streets and the sidewalks filled March’s ears.

  The reason for the Citizens’ universal obesity were the metal canisters strapped to the chairs of the electric carts. Free of charge, the government provided a drug to its Citizens that it claimed promoted good health and mental clarity. The drug, nicknamed “Sugar,” was guaranteed by law to every Citizen a minimum of three times a day. The Silent Order had analyzed Sugar and found that it was actually a highly addictive euphoric that had an additional side effect of crippling the user’s metabolism. As a result, the Renarchist Republic’s Citizens were compliant (criminal charges resulted in the withdrawal of Sugar privileges), disinclined to make trouble, and died early of various metabolic diseases, which cut down on the strain on the Republic’s health systems.

  The Citizens drove their electric carts, sipping from their canisters of Sugar, but their Companions went afoot.

  The android Companions were another guaranteed right of the Citizens of Rustaril. Every Citizen received a Companion upon reaching the age of eighteen, and every single Companion looked like a man or a woman of transcendent beauty, their engineered pseudo-flesh sculpted and shaped and toned. The contrast between the Companions and their Citizens was astonishing. March knew that the Citizens used the Companion androids as domestic servants, social companionship, and what was euphemistically called “intimacy” services.

  A few of the Citizens glanced at March as he walked past their laboring electric carts. Their eyes were dull, incurious, indifferent. Most of the Citizens did not look up from their phones or tablets, their screens filled with videos or games. A few of the Citizens read the Republic’s official news sites. The Citizens who noticed March glared at him with undisguised hostility. At first, he assumed that it was because he looked Calaskaran, or at the very least because he was an outworlder, but then he realized the reason was far simpler.

  He was the only person in sight who was not riding in an electric cart.

  Maybe it would have been wiser to take an autocab to Tolox’s building.

  Fortunately, most of the Citizens were so wrapped up in their tablets and phones or their Sugar-induced stupors that few bothered to notice March at all.

  He had heard many outworlders express contempt for the Rustari Citizenry, but March only felt sorry for them. The Renarchist Republic had taken its people and made them docile and compliant and apathetic. It had imprisoned them, not with locks and bars and barbed wire, but with drugs and empty luxuries and shallow hedonism.

  March wondered how many of the Citizens had ever left Rykov City.

  He turned a corner and made his way down another street, away from the businesses tha
t serviced the spaceport. Squat, ugly warehouses and blocky office buildings rose over the sidewalk, many of them surrounded by chain-link fences topped with coils of razor wire. Given what March had seen of the Citizens of Rustaril, the razor wire seemed excessive.

  At last, March came to Tolox’s address. Her building was a combined office/warehouse, with truck docks on the main floor and an office level above. A single sign next to the driveway leading to the truck docks proclaimed TOLOX VENDING. March walked to the main door, a faceless slab of steel, and hit the buzzer.

  “Yeah?” came a man’s voice, harsh and sullen. “What do you want?”

  “My name’s Jack March,” said March. “I’m here to see Ms. Tolox about a delivery.”

  There was a long pause.

  “All right,” said the sullen voice. “Hang on a moment. I’ll take you to see the boss.”

  There was another long pause, and then the bolts in the door clanged. The door swung open, and March found himself standing face to face with a heavy man in a greasy gray mechanic’s coverall. Most of the Rustari Citizens were big, but this man was big from muscle, his forearms thick and knotted and scarred. His balding black hair had been cut down to stubble, and his eyes squinted with suspicion.

  Then he nodded and stepped to the side.

  “Inside,” he said. “The boss will want to see you.”

  March nodded, and the man shut the door. His demeanor changed when the door locked shut, and he grinned and stuck out his right hand.

  “Glad to meet you, Jack March,” said the man. March shook his hand. “Name’s Niles Dredger. I work for Ms. Tolox, but we both have the same employer. I do some various jobs for Ms. Tolox for our mutual employer.” That meant Dredger was a Delta Operative, a local troubleshooter serving under the command of the Sigma Operative branch chief. “Sorry I had to be harsh.”

  March shrugged. “I’ve had worse things happen to me.”

  Dredger gestured, and they headed down a concrete corridor, dim lights in steel cages overhead. “We’ve got to be careful, and not just for the obvious reasons. We’re always getting junior Administrators sniffing around the warehouse, looking for violations and infractions. The little shits need to get some notches on their belts before they can get promoted, and we’d make a good target.” He grinned. “Fortunately, they come out of the University of Rustaril without knowing a single useful skill and none of them have ever been in a fight in their life. Give them a harsh look, and they melt like butter in the sun.”

  March nodded as he followed Dredger. “Suppose the Securitate’s harder to handle.”

  Dredger grunted. “They are. The Securitate doesn’t fool around. But I don’t think they know about us. That’s the boss’s problem, not mine. And they’ve got their hands full dealing with labor unrest at the algae farms.” He grinned. “The Republic likes to talk a big game about the rights of workers and Citizens, but if anyone threatens their cash flow from the algae farms, they’ll crack down, and they’ll crack down hard. Punch a man in his wallet, and you’ll see where his heart is, I tell you.”

  “Profound,” said March.

  Dredger laughed. “Too deep for me, I think. I just like punching people.” He grinned, the manic, cheery grin of a happy brawler. “Boss tells me where to punch, and I punch. It’s the simple pleasures in life.”

  The corridor ended in another metal door. Dredger unlocked it, and March followed him into a cavernous warehouse. About half the space was taken up with pallets of nonperishable junk food – cases of chocolate bars, chips, soft drinks, and so forth. The other half of the warehouse was full of vending machines in various states of disassembly and disrepair, machine parts stacked around them.

  Against one wall stood a desk supporting a trio of large flat panel monitors and a pair of hologram displays. A coffin-sized portable mainframe system stood next to the desk, whirring softly, lights flashing in its carapace. The screens and holograms showed the management program for several thousand networked vending machines – inventory levels, daily sales, mechanical problems, and so forth.

  At the desk, scowling at the displays, sat a thin woman in early middle age. She wore a coat and a pair of trousers that looked like the usual gray uniform of an Administrator, but the clothes had been subtly altered. The coat was double-breasted and too long, hanging to her knees, and the high-heeled boots were too tall. She had a shock of blond hair that was starting to turn a yellowish white and icy blue eyes. Her mouth was set in a perpetual scowl, the deep lines giving her pale face a bitter cast.

  “Boss,” said Dredger. “This is Jack March. Said you were expecting him.”

  The woman’s cold eyes flicked up and down March, lingering for a moment on the leather bracer and glove that concealed his cybernetic left hand, and she nodded. “I see. Thank you, Dredger.” She rose and extended her hand. “I’m Jacqueline Tolox. Owner and proprietor of Tolox Vending, and chief of our mutual employer’s local branch.” March shook her right hand. Her grasp was bony and dry and surprisingly strong. “We’ve got business to discuss. Come with me. Dredger, keep an eye on things here. We might have work to do later.”

  Dredger nodded, circled around the desk, and dropped into the seat. Tolox walked past March, and he followed her across the warehouse. There was a narrow metal door next to a pair of derelict vending machines, and she produced a keycard and swiped it through the lock. The lock beeped, and Tolox opened the door and stepped through it.

  The room beyond was a large office with a metal floor, the walls and ceiling paneled in an odd, rough-looking material March recognized as foam to block electromagnetic radiation, specifically radio waves. Tolox had taken care to protect her office from prying eyes. A large metal desk sat halfway across the room, supporting another set of flat panel screens and holographic displays that seemed to duplicate the information from the warehouse computer. The only personal item was a picture showing a younger Tolox standing with a smiling man who had the same hawkish features and lean build. Her father, most likely, the former Administrator who had been framed and forced out of the Republic’s bureaucracy, leading his daughter to the Silent Order.

  “You can take a seat,” said Tolox, dropping into the chair behind the desk. March sat in one of the plastic folding chairs. Tolox reached under the desk, picked up a portable scanning unit about the size of a small cooler, and pointed its reticules at March. She frowned for a moment, tapped some keys on the computer, and the scanning unit whirred. Then Tolox nodded to herself and stashed the scanning unit back under the desk.

  “Looks like you’re really Jack March,” said Tolox. “Got the message from Censor on one of last night’s courier ships.”

  “Just as well I was stuck unloading on Rustaril Station for three days,” said March.

  Tolox grinned without humor. “The legendary efficiency of the Renarchist Republic. We can’t even outsource efficiently. Just as well that the Republic has eliminated the need for Citizens to work. God knows I couldn’t hire competent people from the Citizens.” She drummed her fingers on the metal desk for a minute. “You walked here, didn’t you?”

  March nodded.

  “That was a mistake,” said Tolox. “Bet you stood out like a sore thumb.”

  “Yeah,” said March. “Not that many people noticed.”

  Tolox grunted. “The damn city could get nuked, and the Citizens wouldn’t look up from their tablets. But I’m going to be blunt, Captain March.”

  “I’d prefer it,” said March. “Things get done quicker that way.”

  Tolox blinked, and this time she smiled with genuine amusement. “Refreshing to hear that, really. Talk too bluntly to a Citizen, and you’ll get a complaint about regressive speech lodged with the Securitate against you. But let’s be blunt with each other. You’re the wrong man for this problem, March. You’re too fit to be a Rustari Citizen and too muscular to be a Rustari Administrator. You’re obviously an outworlder, and you’ll stand out anywhere you go on Rustaril.”

  “I
agree,” said March. “I don’t think I’m the right operative for this job. But Censor gave the order, and so I came. I’m not in the habit of failing missions, and I don’t want to start now. So, I’m going to find out what happened to Philip Reimer, and you’re going to help me do it.”

  Once again, Tolox smiled. “Direct of you.”

  “You did say you liked bluntness.”

  “I prefer it. It’s rare here. So, then. Censor has given us our tasks, and let’s get to it.” She tapped a key, and one of the holographic displays changed to show a bearded man with the morbid obesity of a Citizen. “Recognize him?”

  “No,” said March. He leaned closer. “Wait. That’s Reimer, isn’t it?”

  He had looked quite different when March had killed him on Constantinople II.

  “That’s him,” said Tolox. “I’ve dug up everything we can find about him, and I’m afraid there’s nothing that stands out. He was an unremarkable Citizen in every way. Born here in Rykov City, normal school record, and at the age of eighteen, he entered the University of Rustaril in hopes of becoming an Administrator. Didn’t work out, so he was a software developer for eight years. After that he got bored, so he left, went on public income with his Companion and his daily ration of Sugar. Ever since then, he seems to have rarely left his apartment, and he never left Rykov City.”

  “Until two months ago,” said March, “when he decided to take a vacation to Constantinople II.”

  Tolox nodded. “Which was totally out of character for him.”

  March frowned. “Did he have any Machinist sympathies?”

  “Not that we know about,” said Tolox. “We have a lot of Machinist sympathizers on Rustaril. Oh, the Republic is officially neutral, but several members of the Presidium would like to see us move closer to the Final Consciousness. But nearly all the Machinist sympathizers are Administrators. Citizens tend not to get involved in politics.” Her mouth twisted with contempt. “The Sugar helps make sure of that. General apathy is a side effect of long-term addiction.”