The Toll

Chapter One: Dead-Loss

The cold woke her before the pain did.

Mika Dessin came up out of nothing the way a diver comes up out of black water — all at once, lungs first. Her suit was chirping. Somewhere behind her left ear a nerve was screaming in a language she used to understand.

She opened her eyes and saw a ceiling that wasn't a ceiling. It was a cargo bay, three hundred meters of ribbed hull sweeping away above her, and she was not lying on the floor. She was drifting, slowly, six or seven meters up, rotating with the unhurried patience of something dead.

No gravity. No lights except the emergency strips, and half of those had gone the dull orange of failing chemistry.

"System," she said. Her voice came out cracked. "Status."

Her helmet display woke up in front of her eyes, and she wished it hadn't.

ATMOSPHERE: RECYCLE 91% EFF.
CONSUMABLE MARGIN: 9 DAYS, 4 HOURS.
EXTERNAL PRESSURE: 0.00 kPa.
MEDICAL: CRANIAL TRAUMA. LATTICE FAULT. SEEK IMMEDIATE SURGICAL REVIEW.

She laughed, once, and the laugh turned into a cough that tasted like copper.

Surgical review. Out here.

She knew where she was before she knew anything else about herself, because the view through the bay's blown-out loading door told her. Beyond the torn lip of hull, stars, and against the stars a ring of dull red beacons strung out in a long chain, so distant they seemed painted on: the perimeter markers of the dead-loss zone. Every relay gate had one. A parking lot for corpses. Ships that arrived without valid transponders, or with tolls unpaid, or with crews unlucky enough to have gone dark mid-transit, were towed out past the markers and abandoned. Salvage law said abandoned hulls belonged to the gate authority. The gate authority was Dahlstrom Transits, and Dahlstrom Transits had never once, in two hundred years, sent a crew to collect.

So the dead-loss zones filled up. Around Callao gate there were something like four thousand hulls, slowly grinding themselves into gravel.

She was in one of them.

Mika made herself breathe. Four in, four out, the way she'd been trained. Panic was an oxygen tax, and she had nine days of oxygen and no ability to pay.

Then she took inventory of her own head.

That was where it got bad.

Behind her left ear, under the surgical plate, sat the carrier lattice — forty grams of grown crystal and threaded neural tissue that had cost her eleven months of recovery and her entire adult savings, and had earned it all back six times over. A neural courier's lattice. The one piece of infrastructure in human space that no network could tap, because it wasn't a network. It was her. Clients handed her a package, the lattice folded it into the unused margins of her own memory, and she carried it across star systems inside her skull, and nobody — not gate customs, not corporate intelligence, not the sniffers on any station in the arm — could read it without her sitting down willingly in a decryption cradle.

She reached for the lattice now the way you reach for a tooth you're afraid is loose.

It was there. It answered. But it answered wrong. Where there should have been a smooth, cool index — a sense of shelves, of order, of things filed and findable — there was a hole with hot edges. Like putting your tongue in a socket.

The last seventy-two hours were not missing so much as shredded. She caught pieces. A brown hand tightening on a throttle grip. A woman's voice saying *that isn't the docking clamp, that's a grapple, Mika, that's a grapple* — and then nothing, and then a smell of burning hair that she was fairly sure was her own.

"Okay," she whispered. "Okay. Later."

She found a stanchion, caught it, and stopped her rotation, and that was when she saw the crew.

There were nine of them. They floated in a loose constellation near the bay's forward bulkhead, gathered there the way debris gathers, drawn by some ghost of air current long since spent. They wore heavy work coveralls with reflective banding at the knees. Mining rigs, maybe, or gate-maintenance contractors. Their faces were the faces vacuum makes: swollen, frost-silvered, mouths open, eyes gone to white lacquer.

Mika hung on the stanchion and looked at them for a long time.

She did not know a single one of them.

That was the part that made her cold in a way the suit couldn't fix. She had a courier's memory, professionally maintained, indexed, and she could tell you the name of every crewmate she'd shipped with in fifteen years and most of the dock officers too. These nine were strangers. Their coveralls carried a subcontractor's chevron — some outfit called Renholt Bore & Line — and one of them, a young man with a soft, unfinished face, still had a stylus clipped to his collar.

She pushed off and went to them, because she had to know.

The suits they wore were not suits. That was the second thing. They had been working in shirtsleeves and coveralls, with no helmets and no seals, which meant they had been aboard a pressurized vessel when it stopped being pressurized. Their hands were empty. There were no tools drifting anywhere in the bay.

Mining crews did not go anywhere without tools.

"You weren't working," Mika said aloud. "You were brought here."

The young man with the stylus rotated slowly toward her, as if in agreement, and she had to grab a rib and hold still until her stomach settled.

*Think.*

She was a neural courier. She had been carrying something. She always was. Her lattice was burned out — not damaged by accident, she realized, feeling along the plate behind her ear with a gloved fingertip and finding the tell-tale ridge of a fresh extraction seal. Somebody had cracked the plate, gone in with a reader, and pulled her cargo. Extraction on a living subject was a nine-hour procedure in a good clinic. Done fast, it left exactly this: a lattice with its index burned to slag, a client's package gone, and a courier with a ruined memory who would be lucky to remember her own middle name.

They had taken the package. Then they had put her in a dead hull in the dead-loss zone with nine strangers who had died in vacuum, and left.

Why leave her breathing?

She worked it, because working it was better than screaming.

Because a courier found dead of decompression is a courier who was murdered, and a courier found alive in a hull full of murdered contractors is a *suspect.*

That thought arrived with such clean, cold logic that she believed it immediately.

Mika stopped being afraid then, mostly. Fear needs a future to live in. What she had instead was something that felt like a hand closing.

She went to work.

The hull had been a bulk freighter once, an old wide-body, the kind that hauled ore in unpressurized bays and had a habitat spine bolted along the top like a spider on a log. Whoever stripped her had been thorough. Reactor gone. Drive cones gone. Every gram of copper peeled out of the walls. But strippers took what they could sell, and there were two things on any hull that nobody bought: the pressure hull itself, and the mandatory emergency locator beacon.

Beacons were legally welded in. Legally tamper-proof. Legally required to broadcast on the Dahlstrom Transits distress band, and *only* the distress band, because rescue was a service, and services were billed.

Mika found the beacon housing after six hours of searching, forward and up, in a service alcove behind a collapsed ladder. It was a squat grey box the size of a bread oven with a hard-wired antenna trunk running up through the hull. Its status light was dark.

Of course it was dark. If it had been broadcasting, the hull wouldn't have been in dead-loss.

She braced herself in the alcove and tried to think about beacons and could not, at first, find the knowledge. The hole behind her ear had eaten pieces of her expertise along with her life. She sat with that for a while. Then she stopped trying to remember and simply put her hands on the thing, and her hands knew: unclip here, the bypass tab is under here, the power cell is separate from the hull bus by design, that's the whole point.

Her hands knew. Fifteen years of doing was still in the muscle.

The cell had charge — beacons carried thirty-year cells. She got the housing open and looked at the transmitter board and understood the trap: the board had a fixed frequency lock. Dahlstrom distress band or nothing. And if she lit up the Dahlstrom band from a hull in dead-loss, a Dahlstrom response boat would come, and a Dahlstrom response boat would find a woman with an extraction seal behind her ear and nine dead contractors, and she would never see a courtroom.

She hung there in the dark with the beacon's guts in her lap and let herself think the word.

*Framed.*

For the first time she noticed that her hands weren't shaking. They should have been. She noted the absence, filed it, and kept working.

It was on the second day — she was counting by the suit's chrono now, forcing herself into a schedule of six hours' work and four hours' rest, sipping the suit's thin sugared water — that she found the shard.

She had been trying to sleep, strapped to a rib with a length of cargo webbing, and the itch behind her ear had gone from maddening to unbearable. She pushed her glove up under the helmet seal — a bad idea, a broken-seal alarm, forty seconds of shrieking before she got it closed again — and worked a fingertip along the plate.

There was something under the lip of it. Not the extraction seal. Below that, tucked into the shallow trough where the plate met bone, something rectangular and hard and no bigger than a fingernail paring.

It took her twenty minutes to get it out. It came away with a thread of half-frozen blood.

She held it up to the orange emergency strip and turned it, and the light caught the interference pattern on its face: a data shard, medical-grade, the kind surgeons used for implant firmware. It was seated in a biological adhesive that had been engineered to bond to bone.

Somebody had put it there. Deliberately. In a spot that a fast extraction crew would never check, because a fast extraction crew was interested in the lattice, not the plate.

Mika turned it over and found, etched so small she had to strain, three characters: *D.M.*

And the hole behind her ear moved.

That was the only way to describe it. Something down in the burned index shifted, and a fragment came loose and floated up into her, whole and vivid and violently out of place:

An old woman's hands, brown-spotted, holding a cup of tea in a room that smelled of dust and machine oil. A voice, dry as paper. *You will not read it. You will not be able to read it. That is the point, Miss Dessin. If you could read it, you would be worth torturing.*

And then, closer, urgent: *Two copies leave this room. You will only ever know about one.*

Mika's breath went ragged in the helmet.

"Doro," she said, and had no idea, yet, why the name tasted like a debt.

She closed her hand around the shard.

She had seven days of air, a broken head, nine strangers keeping her company, and a beacon that could only call the people who wanted her dead.

The strippers, she thought suddenly. Strippers who take the copper out of a dead hull do not come in on a Dahlstrom distress band. They listen on something else. And a beacon board is just a board.

She unstrapped from the rib and went back to the alcove.