Copper Rain

Copper Rain Part 4

The Present

I spent the rest of the night in my hab trying to avoid the whisky bottle's Siren call and working hard to keep my babbling brain on the straight and narrow. Something about the tetracap card was causing my usually subdued inner fiends to wake up and sashay little steps along the avenues of my memory. So I forced that shit back into the dark side of my brain and settled down to run some data.

My resident's hab is the same size as the standard domes the miners live in, but differently appointed as it also doubles as the backup to the main security office in the admin building. HeXtract, the company I'm contracted to, takes security extremely seriously, and I'm only one aspect of an umbrella's worth of protection. I deal mainly in data flow, looking for patterns that indicate there's trouble on the way—trouble usually coming in the form of a hostile takeover. And when I say hostile, I mean actual battles with actual weapons. Being this far out in the universe means corporate disputes are handled the old-fashioned way—through direct application of violence.

Late in the twenty-second century the discovery of rip-tech allowed humanity to thrust itself into the wider universe, taking with us the values that had massacred a perfectly viable home planet. Initially, ripping a hole in the fabric of space worried some of the bleeding heart environmentalists back on the mother rock, but the massive system-spanning conglomerates didn't even pretend to give a shit. They took advantage and sponsored, or more accurately bribed, the first of the new wave of explorers who hurled themselves into the void hungry for the corporate buck. These giant corporations had already mined their way through the inner asteroid and Kuiper belts, and they were eager for resources to fund their expansion beyond the limitations of Earth's solar system.

But as technologically advanced as we had become; the twin dreams of faster-than-light travel and universal peace were beyond us. Add in our propensity to take offense at the slightest slur, and we were left with the chilling fact that we humans were still not able to get far enough away from each other to ensure our species survival. And with our soon-to-be compromised biology, a path to the stars was seen as a way to start anew.

So each wormhole rip resulted in the kind of mini-war people used to associate with breaches in a country's border—back when people believed that political egos rather than business profits ran the system. But in a natural extension of humanity's desire to dominate, the wars then became more corporate and, thanks to market forces, more efficient.

So it was my job not only to detect this type of takeover coming, but also to run a cost-benefit analysis as to whether it was even worth defending the assets we had. On occasion I would even share info with my counterpart on the other side, and together we would judge whether the cost in blood, resources, and goodwill was actually worth fighting over.

Our parent corporations turned a blind eye to these back channel dealings as they were more interested in the bottom line than anything else. In fact, it was exactly these types of dealings that made me valuable to HeXtract. But it was also my inside knowledge of these practices that made me a risk to the company, which is why they never let me leave a nub unless I was going to one of the regional HQs under armed escort. I wasn't, according to my contract, a prisoner, but then I wasn't exactly free either.

But the data patterns today are clean. I'd forgotten what alpha numeric designation they'd given this piece of shit space splinter, but the mineral extraction tonnage has been showing a steep decline for months. And with the tapering off of production, comes the tapering off of external threats—hence my initial decision to meet with Zoie-the-client to stop me sluicing further into the bottle.

So here I am, soul-sucking day job done with, now it's time to dig deeper and see if there's anything that might flag as a Titus presence. I'm about to get down to business when the seni-health band on my wrist vibrates—fucking technology. If I'm a slave to anything, I'm a slave to this. I tap the band to shut down the beeping, but it only gets more insistent. Shit, I've ignored it for too long. I need to hit the rubber room.