The Fringe Wars

4.4

Ghost Town

Sol Base, Darios

"This is creepy," Sixx said.

"You won't hear me tell you differently," Reyne said as they passed an empty food cart in Sol Base.

"The last time I was here," Sixx continued, "the street was so crowded, I couldn't even see who grabbed my ass."

"Don't you mean who tried to pickpocket you?"

"Same difference."

The pair strolled down Main Street. What was once Darios's largest colony, and home to the busiest fringe station, was now practically a ghost town. The blight had cleared out the entire population. After Reyne had sprayed fungicide over the colony, eradicating the deadly blight, the CUF had wasted no time in securing the fringe station and its space docks.

With the CUF fully in control, few colonists had any interest in settling the colony. The planet produced a huge portion of the Collective's food supply, including all the philoseed and cavote, two bean-like staples in every civilian and colonist's diet. Alluvia and Myr depended on Darios, making Sol Base the CUF's most closely-guarded colony. Darios's value to the Collective also meant it was the most highly regulated, with over eighty percent tariffs on all exports.

It had taken offers of free housing and guaranteed income to draw in even the minimum few hundred colonists required to get the fringe station and its space docks back up and running. Before the blight, Sol Base was the home to over seventy thousand colonists. Now, all the dromadiers, traders, and colonists totaled less than one percent of pre-blight numbers.

Anything the blight had touched had to be decontaminated. A massive hole, a mile in diameter, was dug to burn and then bury all the bodies in. Bulldozers and trucks ran nonstop for over a month cleaning out the colony. It took contractors another three months to sanitize the buildings and streets. Now, everything glistened like new construction.

Reyne looked to the horizon, where the mass grave stood—a hill covered in new prairie grasses. There were no signs, no structures to memorialize the area. That would cost money, and Parliament never saw fit to spend money on the fringe if it didn't net a return. Parliament should've not only built a memorial but also paid a token to the relatives of those killed. After all, it was Senator Gabriel Heid who'd been responsible for dropping the blight on Sol Base. Heid had never claimed credit for the massacre; hell, he'd even spun the story and put the blame on the torrents. The puppet master was behind every major event that had taken place in the Collective over the past few years, and Reyne would see that he was stopped.

Reyne scowled and turned away from the mass grave.

"A lot of good people died that day," Sixx said.

Reyne noticed his friend had been watching him. "You mean folks like Double-jointed Sally?"

Sixx shook his head. "She was talented, but she wasn't good. That woman beat on kids. No, I'm talking about folks like Lamitie."

"The constable who arrested you for theft?"

Sixx shrugged. "It was my fault I got caught. Lamitie—he was one of the good ones. He was always looking out for those who needed looking out for."

"Yeah. I remember," Reyne agreed as images of other Sol Base residents passed through his mind. Some he'd met once, some he'd known for decades, and some he wished he'd had the chance to meet. All of their deaths were a part of a political ploy to bring public opinion down on the fringe. "They're the reason why we fight: to stop the Collective from doing things like this again."