Free Space by Sean Danker

Author:Sean Danker
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-03-28T17:53:06+00:00

13

FREEBER pulled us out of the cargo compartment, more roughly this time. He had more patience than Willis, but at some point he had to get tired of dragging us around. That was fine with me; I was anxious to part ways too.

I’d braced myself for bright, painful light, but I didn’t get it. We weren’t in the open. My eyes adjusted, and I realized this was a residential district, a closed corridor with only a limited amount of space for vehicular travel. I could hear the vague roar of business from somewhere above, reverberating through the station’s superstructure.

Even by Free Trade station standards, this was a slum. Narrow little apartments lined long, tall, featureless blocks that flanked the passage. The ceiling wasn’t even smart carbon; someone had actually painted it blue. It couldn’t even simulate the look of sky. And that paint had been applied a long time ago; now it was coated with grime and buildup.

The walls near the ground were covered in crude adhesives and amateur artwork. Loud, grinding music was audible from one of the apartments, and I could smell controlled chemicals in the air.

Recyclers coughed and rattled, and half the light fixtures were dead, leaving the corridor’s lighting gray and grainy.

Sei looked around with obvious distaste. I’d seen places like this before, though not for a while. Still, the corridor itself was spacious, and the apartments were more or less intact—so no matter how shabby it all looked, this probably wasn’t, by Bazaar standards, a bad place to live. Compared to the Bazaar proper, it was wonderfully peaceful. That alone was almost enough to make me forget that the control cuffs now seemed to weigh about twice what they had half an hour before. The same for my shoes.

Freeber guided us toward a stairwell. There were lifts, but it didn’t look like any of them worked. The carbon shield over emergency levers and biohazard sensors had all been broken long ago. There were safety violations everywhere.

At least down here these two probably didn’t have to worry about station security catching up to them. If the lights weren’t being maintained, surveillance probably wasn’t either.

It probably cost a thousand Free Trade credits a month to rent one of these apartments. Maybe more, since lodging within the Bazaar was so scarce.

In the Empire, you could live in a vastly nicer—though perhaps slightly smaller—sustenance apartment for absolutely nothing. You’d have your own combiner and a small living stipend, all courtesy of the Empress. For nothing. Just for being Evagardian. What about health care? Education? These people had to struggle for everything that the poorest imperial took for granted.

They worked hard to live here. Even Cohengard, the most reviled city in the Empress’ embrace, was like a fantasy ideal compared with this block.

True, it was humiliating to live on sustenance and depend on the Empress, but was it worse than this? In the Imperium, that was a contentious topic.

We climbed up two flights, making our way down the row. Below,

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