to Manuel Griego’s salvage yard in Nuevo Janeiro. The van needed some work before it could head out into the world, and Ramon wanted it done now.
Griego’s yard squatted at the edge of the city. The hulking frames of old vans and canopy fliers and personal shuttles littered the wide acres. In the hangar, it was equal parts junk shop and clean room. Power cells hung from the rafters, glowing with the eerie light that all Turu technology seemed to carry with it. A nuclear generator the size of a small apartment ran along one wall, humming to itself. Storage units were stacked floor to ceiling; tanks of rare gas and undifferentiated nanoslurry mixed in with half-bald tires and oily drive trains. Half the things in the shop would cost more than a year’s wages just to make use of; half were hardly worth the effort to throw out. Old Griego himself was hammering away on a lift tube as Ramon set his van down on the pad.
‘Hey, ese,’ Griego called out when Ramon popped the doors and came down to the working floor. ‘Long time. Where you been keeping yourself?’
Ramon shrugged.
‘I got a power drop in my back lift tubes,’ he said.
Griego frowned, put down his hammer, and wiped greasy hands on greasy pants.
‘Put on the diagnostic,’ he said. ‘Let’s take a look.’
Of all the men in Diegotown and Nuevo Janeiro – or possibly on this world – Ramon liked old Griego best – which was to say, he only hated him a little. Griego was an expert on all things vehicular, a post-contact Marxist, and, so far as Ramon could make out, totally free of moral judgments. It took them little more than an hour to find where the lift tube’s chipset had lost coherence, replace the card, and start the system’s extensive self-check. As the van stuttered and chuffed to itself, Griego lumbered to one of the gray storage tanks, keyed in a security code, and opened a refrigeration panel to reveal a case of local black beer. He hauled out two bottles, snapping the caps free with a flick of his thick, callused fingers. Ramon took the one that was held out to him, squatted with his back against a drum of spent lubricant, and drank. The beer was thick and yeasty, sediment in the bottom like a spoonful of mud.
‘Pretty good, eh?’ Griego said and drank a quarter of his own at a pull.
‘Not bad,’ Ramon said.
‘So you’re heading out?’
‘This is going to be the big one,’ Ramon said. ‘This time I’m coming back a rich man. You wait. You’ll see.’
‘You better hope not,’ Griego said. ‘Too much money kills men like you and me. God meant us to be poor, or he wouldn’t have made us so mean.’
Ramon grinned. ‘God meant you to be mean, Manuel. He just didn’t want me taking any shit from anybody.’ A quick vision of the European, mouth gaping open, blood gushing out over tombstone teeth, came to him, and he frowned.
Griego was shaking his head. ‘The same thing again, eh? This time’s the one, just like every other time you been out.’ He grinned. ‘You know how many times I heard you say that?’
‘Yep,’ Ramon said. ‘This time’s different, just like always.’
‘Go with God, then,’ Griego said. His grin faded. ‘Everyone’s been scrambling. Trying to get things finished. Aliens caught everyone with their pants around their knees, coming early like this. Funny, though. I don’t see a whole lot of people heading out right now. Pretty much everyone’s coming in for the ships – except you.’
Ramon sneered, but he felt the constant fear in his breast tighten a notch.
‘What? They’re going to give half a shit about a prospector like me? What’s there for me if I stay?’
‘Didn’t say you should,’ Griego said. ‘Just said there’s not many people going out right now.’
I look suspicious, Ramon thought. I look like I’m running from something. He’ll tell the police, and then I’m fucked. He clamped his hand around the bottle so hard his knuckles ached.
‘It’s Elena,’ Ramon said, hoping the half-lie would be convincing enough.
‘Ah,’ Griego said, nodding sagely. ‘I thought it must be something like that.’
‘She kicked me out again,’ Ramon said, trying to sound hang-dog despite the relief washing through him. ‘We had a fight about the parade. It got a little out of hand is all.’
‘She know you’re taking off?’
‘I don’t think she cares,’ Ramon said.
‘Right now, maybe she doesn’t. But you fly out of here and three weeks later she decides that all is forgiven, she’s going to come around tearing up my place.’
Ramon chuckled, remembering the incident that Griego was talking about. He was wrong, though. That hadn’t been about making peace; Elena had convinced herself that Ramon had taken a woman with him when he went out in the field. She hadn’t stopped raging and ranting until she found the girl on whom her paranoia had fixed still in town and involved with one of the magistrates, and even then she still seemed to hold a grudge. Ramon had had to spend almost half the money he’d gotten from his survey work just buying beer and kaafa kyit for all his business contacts whom she’d alienated.
Griego didn’t laugh with him.
‘You know she’s crazy, don’t you?’ he asked instead.
‘She does get pretty wild,’ Ramon said with a half-smile, trying the expression out like it was a new shirt.
‘No, I know wild girls. Elena is fucking loca. I know you like that girl down at the exchange. What’s her name?’
‘Lianna?’ Ramon asked, disbelief in his voice.
‘Yeah that’s the one. Lives over on the north side. Used to be you had a thing with her, didn’t you?’
Ramon remembered those days, when he’d been a younger man, new to the colony. Yes, there had been a woman with coffee-and-milk skin and a laugh that made a man happy just listening to it. Maybe he had even dreamed about her a few times since. But that had carried its own slice of hell with it. Ramon scratched at the scar that striped his belly. Griego raised an eyebrow and Ramon coughed out a laugh.
‘She’s … No. No, she’s not like that. There couldn’t be anything between someone like her and someone like me. And don’t ever let Elena hear you say different.’
Griego gestured his discretion with a wave of his bottle. Ramon took another pull. The thick, earthy taste of the beer was growing on him. He wondered how much alcohol the brew carried.
‘Lianna was a good woman,’ Ramon said. ‘Elena’s like me, though. We understand each other, you know?’ His voice filled with a sudden bitterness that surprised him. ‘We deserve each other.’
‘If you say so,’ Griego said, and the van chimed, its self-test complete. Ramon levered himself up and followed Griego to where the results floated in the air. The power and variance checked at each level, just edging down below optimal on the highest range. Griego waved a crooked finger at the drop.
‘That’s a little weird,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should take another look at –’
‘It’s the cable,’ Ramon said. ‘Salt rats ate through the old one. I had to get gold for the replacement. Couldn’t afford the carbon mesh.’
‘Ah,’ Griego said and clicked his tongue in something between sympathy and disapproval. ‘Yeah, that would do it. Too bad about the rats. That’s the problem with scaring away all the predators, eh? We wind up protecting all the things they used to eat, like salt rats and flatfurs, and then they’re everywhere.’
‘I’ll take a few rats if I don’t have to worry that there’s chupacabras and redjackets in the street every time I go out for a piss,’ Ramon said. ‘Besides, if we didn’t have vermin, how would we know we’d made a real city, right?’
Griego snapped off the display and shrugged. They settled the