GW Fic: Freeport 4 (rewrite)
Here's the next chapter ^_^ Thanks for the reviews and encouragments!
Link to all chapters
I met my love by the gas works wall
Dreamed a dream by the old canal
Kissed a girl by the factory wall
Dirty old town
Dirty old town
Heard a siren from the docks
Saw a train set the night on fire
Smelled the spring on the smokey wind
Dirty old town
Dirty old town
--- 'Dirty Old Town', The Pogues
Freeport by Maldoror
Chapter Four
"Welcome to Freeport!" Duo exclaimed with a sweeping gesture as if he were giving Wufei the colony on a platter. "What do you think?"
Wufei looked up and down the long corridor. "I think I've seen more attractive submarines."
Duo snickered as if that answer had been everything he'd expected it to be, and walked away with a wave of his hand inviting Wufei to follow.
Their steps echoed in the wide hallway. It was as badly lit as the docking ring: a long tunnel with wires running along the unpainted wall, with the occasional crop of crude light bulbs sprouting out of the tangled vines of cables. The floor beneath their feet was steel with metal lattices down the centre under which ran pipes of various girths, coded for water, high-power lines and sewage in corroded colors.
They passed dozens of doors leading to other docking rings to reach a huge open-sided elevator. Further down the corridor, men and women bundled in long coats and mittens put boxes and crates onto a wide electric cart, but nobody looked their way as the elevator clunked and started to rise.
They were in complete darkness for fifteen long seconds as the elevator climbed through the thick floor separating the docking ring and the section above. Then they were through. The elevator didn't stop; it continued to inch its way up the wall, slowly revealing another part of Freeport to the newcomer's eyes.
Wufei tried hard to keep his customary inscrutable expression as he leaned against the elevator's guardrail and looked out into the huge sector around them.
"You okay?" Apparently his attempt to keep his surprise off his face had been only partially successful. Duo was examining him. "You look like your eyes and nose are itching. Smell's pretty bad here, heh?"
Yes, it was. The chemical reek was choking as they rose above Freeport's industrial zone.
Freeport had been a working penitentiary at its beginnings. Wufei had absently envisioned a workshop full of license plates or something on that scale. Apparently the colony had expanded on whatever it had been bequeathed when it had gained its independence. The industrial sprawl dropping slowly below them was immense.
The yards and buildings were lit by harsh white floodlights. The remaining shadows were peppered with smaller lights, red for warning and green for emergency exits amidst yellow streetlights. Huge factories echoed with the bang of manufacture, the roar of turbines and the growl of heavy machinery. Instead of chimney stacks, pipes sprung from the buildings like arteries; they pumped the poisoned air to a huge filter unit the size of a house, hissing and belching out vapor, the hot air mingling with the cool temperatures of the colony. From the heavy chemical stench prickling the insides of Wufei's nose, Freeport had considered it an unwanted luxury to filter out anything other than the truly toxic chemicals.
A hiss and rich golden-red glow caught his attention. A few buildings away from where their elevator crawled up the wall, a huge vat of molten metal had tipped its contents into long molds manipulated by cranes. Making steel girders, he guessed, though it was hard to tell. A waft of scorched metal scent drifted over the two observers. The steel sparked and flamed in the molds, turning cherry red as it cooled. It was like the third of the ten levels of Hell, Wufei thought a bit fancifully; the level traditionally reserved for felons, drug traffickers, tomb robbers, fences and rioters. How very appropriate.
Duo spat out a piece of the chewed up stick he'd been gnawing at and spoke loudly over the din: "The stuff we need for the shipyards is shipped from other colonies, but we cut costs by making some components here. And other stuff for Freeport itself, like pipes and metal panels and shit."
"Is that a chemical plant?" Wufei asked, his eyes fixed on a building at the edge of the colony's 'horizon'. It was ringed with a complex array of long pipelines, tanks and distillation vats.
Duo leaned past him to look, almost too late to catch a glimpse of it before it was hidden by the colony's curve as the elevator rose higher. "Looks like it."
"Good gods, Maxwell, that violates every rule of- of fundamental security-" Wufei closed his lips tightly, remembering the insane waltz of ships outside, each a potential threat that could crash into the colony at any time. Right. Freeport apparently had fairly loose standards that way.
"It ain't nothing real volatile. We don't allow that on the colony." The elevator had dragged them through another floor, obliterating their view of the huge space below and plunging them into near-darkness again, relieved only by the dim lighting of the elevator's buttons and emergency exit sign. "Anything explosive is kept on the mining satellites or in floating refineries out in space, same as other colonies."
Wufei remembered the tiny figures scurrying around the yards, driving trucks, working around those pipelines and vats of molten metal. Whatever Duo said, he was rather glad to not be in their place. Being on the same colony was going to be bad enough.
"Nearly there." Duo was looking upwards where a dim light promised the end of the elevator ride. "Then we can take the shuttle to the living quarters."
So they wouldn't have to walk? Good. Wufei was getting tired. It wasn't only the past two weeks that were catching up with him; he'd been pushing the envelope this past year and, hard as it was to admit it, he wasn't fifteen any more.
He shouldn't have to feel like an old veteran just because he was now twenty, but he remembered his younger self when he'd first joined the Preventer's Special Unit as another man entirely. Riots, unrest, multiple plots...he'd faced them all with the zeal of someone recently and finally converted to the ideals of Peace. The unrest had lasted over a year, but then things had started to quiet down. The lessening tension had felt like a reward for their hard work, a promise that things were really improving. Humanity had learned its lesson.
But then last year, riots and trouble had started to boil up again in the colonies and some hot-spots on Earth. Mainly L3 and L2, with a few of the L4 mining colonies thrown in. Wufei had spent over a month hunting down gunrunners in L3, trying to keep the situation from erupting into something worse, and then he'd been doing extreme riot control for Une in L2. And those two weeks on L2-X953. If he never saw that particular colony again, he'd die a happy man. At this point he didn't care if he was in Freeport or in Hell: he just wanted to get to where they were going and sleep in a bed for the first time in over eight days.
The elevator left them in a wide bay. On one side was an elevator pod waiting to take passengers through a hole in the ceiling, going up into one of the spokes leading to the Zero-G docking bay at the axis of the colony. Duo walked past it and stopped at the edge of a platform besides several sets of train tracks which vanished into the darkness of a tunnel on either side of the bay. There was no one else around. They'd barely made it to the platform when a noise down the tunnel announced the train's arrival.
It was automated, with only two wagons behind a small engine. Four people were sitting together in the first wagon, but Duo got into the second empty one. Wufei followed him to a set of hard plastic benches.
"Maxwell, where are we going to start looking for-" the train started and completely drowned Wufei's words. There had been no attempt to soundproof the train's carriages or do much about suspension. Wufei felt his teeth rattle, and he grabbed the edge of his seat to avoid being bumped off. After a few seconds the train's rhythm eased and the ride was a bit smoother, but it was still too noisy for conversation.
They rode without a word for a few minutes. The train slowed and stopped a couple of times. Two people got on at one of the stops, going into the other carriage. Wufei didn't have the patience to continue grilling Duo during the few seconds of respite from the noise.
Another stop and someone entered their carriage. Wufei observed him discreetly. Male, late twenties, medium height, thick build, black hair, dressed in protective gear soiled with oil and marks of solder wiped off on his thigh...
Wufei's skin prickled as he realized that the man was staring at him, then at Duo. The Preventer shifted, making sure his scabbard wasn't blocked by the seat. Before he could get truly concerned, the man looked away and tossed his hard hat on a bench five rows ahead of them before sitting down. Wufei glanced at Duo. The latter was chewing his liquorice with a sleepy air. If he was disturbed by the factory hand's unexpectedly intense scrutiny, he didn't show it.
The train shook in a bone-jarring bump over a set of points. Wufei looked out the grimy plastic window in time to see the open doors of a massive airlock pass them by. They must be entering the half of the wheel that contained the living quarters. The airlock was there to isolate it from the industrial zone in case of a serious fire or explosions, a thought that wasn't really all that reassuring.
The ride became smoother, the noise faded to less-than-deafening level, not that Wufei felt at leisure to talk with the stranger sitting nearby.
"Here, this is our stop," Duo announced, nudging Wufei. "We'll go through Volt, it's faster and I want to drop by Chris's stand."
Wufei followed numbly, trying to shake some feeling back into his body, nerves deadened by the vibrations. His ears rang as the train pulled away. He followed Duo to yet another airlock.
"You're not afraid of heights, right?" Duo tossed over his shoulders as he led Wufei through a low tunnel.
"Of course not," Wufei muttered.
"Good." A door opened with a wheezy automatic creak as they approached. They stepped through it and out onto a large skirt of metal over a drop of several hundred feet, dimly lit by the ever-present yellow and red bulbs.
"What..." Wufei realized there was an elevator platform slowly rising to meet them. "This goes all the way through to the outer hull?"
"Yeah. There's one of these shafts every three or four sectors of the living quarters. There are two levels in this part of Freeport. The outer level of the wheel is storage, pumps, filters, recyc, hydroponics, all that sorta stuff. The middle section is the living quarters, and the highest level is the shuttle tunnel."
"Oh." Wufei glanced around. The elevator platform was still some distance away and there was no one around. "Duo, what exactly am I supposed to know? As your, er, Blade?"
"You heard what I told Karl. You're new in Freeport, and a new Blade too. That means you're allowed a number of dumb questions, and hopefully it'll give you some leeway if you screw up." Duo looked like he was rather expecting it. Wufei throttled an acrid remark. "Keep in mind, though: people who come to Freeport...well, they already know about it. Hell, I practically lived off Freeport legends in the fucking godawful slums I grew up in, and so have most people who managed to make their way here. There's stuff all spacers like me know about. And you..."
Duo gave him a look at that point. It was steady, measuring and slightly dismissive.
"You are rather misinformed," Duo finished, looking away again.
Wufei could feel his hackles rise, though he couldn't deny Duo's words. He didn't actually know all that much about Freeport except for rumors and legends, and those were mainly about the lawlessness and criminal underworld that thrived here. Wufei had been too busy on Earth and the more orderly colonies to worry about Freeport these last few years. Before that, Freeport was a haunt of low-lives and pledge-breakers that the scion of an honorable colony would know nothing about.
They stepped out onto the platform as it ground to a halt with a thump at their level. It was ten feet by fifteen, big enough to carry small cargo, open on the side with only thin guardrails protecting its passengers from the drop below.
Wufei was about to ask another question when a noise interrupted him. It grew louder, a grinding, chugging, hissing uproar echoed around the metal walls like a drum being relentlessly pounded. Wufei had his hand on his sword's hilt, a gesture of defense ingrained into his bones however useless in this instance. He stared wildly at the ceiling above their head, remembering the ships dancing around the colony's wheel-
"Cargo train!" Duo shouted above the noise.
Oh. Wufei stood down with a shudder. In his mind's eye the chemical plant was exploding, sheeting the colony's air with fire and gasses; ships were tearing into the hulls; all the space debris outside was pounding through the walls...
"Get many incidents of space mania in this dump?" he asked as the racket above their heads faded with a distant rhythmic clacking of wheels on tracks.
Duo simply shrugged.
The elevator crawled down a few more feet. Wufei stared around him. Apparently the lack of lighting was generalized. The darkness was oppressive.
"What's the suicide rate?" Wufei added a bit snidely.
"What you got to realize is that most people in Freeport have as many lives as a cat, and they spent over half of them getting here," Duo said, nibbling his stick with every appearance of unconcern. "Space puppies like us tend not to let the wibblies go to our head."
"The lives of a cat? Then by any reasonable estimate, you have a tab running, Maxwell."
Duo smiled proudly, but his reply was cut by a ringing thump coming from below, followed by a ratcheting clatter.
"And so has Freeport," Wufei added, his voice a bit hoarse. "What was that?"
"Someone moving a cargo pod down below," Duo answered without glancing around. His eyes were still on Wufei, weighing. "All this gonna be a problem for you, Chang?"
"I was born and raised on a colony," Wufei reassured him stiffly. And to be honest, A0206 had been pretty dilapidated too. Wufei had grown up, like most space-born citizens, in an environment where a sharp metallic 'ping' could be the sound of a gasket breaking, a seal breaching, the start of the invasion of the void that surrounded them and tried to rip them apart at the seams every second of their lives. All colonists lived with that constant feeling of vulnerability, with the ever-present precautions they had to take, with the knowledge that if something went wrong there would be no second chances and probably not even a first. They lived at the mercy of vacuum and that was notoriously merciless.
The pressure broke some people down, reduced to wrecks by the constant inescapable knowledge of their own human frailty in an environment that was as ultimately as hostile to them as it could get. The incidence of space mania had decreased steadily in the last two decades on civilized colonies, where some effort was spent on mimicking earth conditions; fake skies, day and night cycles, artificial breezes and as much nature as the colony could afford. But the human mind couldn't always be fooled. Those who succumbed to the phobia either went back to earth or ended up in a psych ward. But Wufei had learned to live and fight in space. He had his flaws, but that one, fortunately, had never been one of them.
- a second grinding thump echoed up from the shaft, followed by a deep, creaking noise -
Until now, a small part of Wufei amended. It was the part that had had the nightmares when he was seven, after his parents had been killed in a shuttle accident. It knew what vacuum victims looked like...But he reined in the memories. This wouldn't be a problem. The mental discipline of the warrior would keep him focused even as the survival instincts of the colonist were telling him to get the hell out of this deathtrap already.
The elevator platform stopped after dropping seventy feet, and they stepped off. Another airlock protected the living quarters. It hissed open to a waft of air and the scent of a lot of people living in close proximity.
The sector was darker than any night on earth could ever be. The ceiling was invisible above their heads. The streets were lit by harsh white neon, nearly blue in their intensity; space lighting, the kind his colony had only used in hangars and docking rings. They sliced the eternal night of the streets into monochrome chunks.
But the scene they illuminated was not the one Wufei had expected. He'd envisioned a seedy slum, lit up in all the colors of an oil slick by neon advertising bars and strip joints. Freeport's air was rich with the smell of a rather inadequate sewer system and the chemical tang that had followed them from the industrial zone, but the stench of rotten garbage, piss, vomit and misery were absent.
The habitations were the expected pre-fabricated easy to assemble boxes found on most colonies, though Wufei had never seen such a heteroclite bunch brought together. It looked like Freeport had scrounged them together from every end-of-line sale there'd ever been. The buildings stood four to six stories high on either side of the wide streets and nearly touching the invisible ceiling.
Their steps echoed as they wound their way through the prefabricated canyon. Everything was metal here, no care had been taken to hide the fact they were in a glorified tin can floating through space. A dribble of steam eased out from under a manhole cover, air warmed by the sewage system beneath it escaping into the ambient chill.
A cat, thin and feral as a rat, paused as it crossed the street to eye them coldly before disappearing into a crack between two buildings. Junk had been stacked there with odd neatness and order; bed frames, broken chairs, a smashed computer screen, cracked cupboards, pots of paint...After the next block was another open space lined with benches. A seesaw and a sandpit were being ignored by the kids playing there, though apparently not by another cat which was carefully digging away at the sand. The three children were dressed in grey and tattered woolen jumpers against the cold. They were involved in a violent game of tag that involved a lot of horseplay and screaming. Their voices bounced around the buildings, shrill and loud before being completely drowned out by another clatter from up above, a bit more muffled than in the elevator shaft but still ominously present. Wufei tensed. The kids didn't even pause in their game or glance upwards. An elderly man on a bench watched the children without interfering in the rough-housing. He appeared to be darning socks. He had a whole stack of them next to him, and he split his attention between the children and his needle.
Duo walked down the street with his usual assured gait. Wufei followed more slowly, observing everything while keeping up a pretense of disinterest. There were no shops that he could see. Maybe this was just the 'dorm' section of the colony. A few citizens leaned out the windows or sat on stoops, talking. They watched the two men pass with an open curiosity which surprised and worried the Preventer. These inhabitants didn't look like layabouts. They were dressed in thick workman's pants, jumpers or coats, and he didn't see any of them drinking or taking anything illicit. Damn, Wufei remembered, taking the liquorice stick out of his mouth to glare at it, at this point I'm more of a disreputable figure than they are.
"Just stopping at Chris's stand," Duo said over his shoulder. He turned down a road perpendicular to the main thoroughfare. A few carts had gathered halfway down the street, metal frames cobbled together with cheap plastic boarding, small enough for one person to push around without too much trouble. They were gaily decorated with colored paper and paint, the first splash of vivid color Wufei had seen in Freeport apart from the arterial red of warning lights. A couple of women loitered nearby, talking to one of the stall vendors in the low, intense voices of gossips everywhere.
Duo drew up before the most colorful of the carts. There was something colorful behind the cart, too. Wufei, with mission-born concentration and culturally ingrained restraint, managed not to stare. Chris, if that was him - her? - was a thickset person in vivid red overalls with an electric blue shawl over round shoulders. Bulky fingers worked some knitting needles, turning grey wool into a thick-knit tube. He... she?...seemed to have a good five o'clock shadow going on thickset jowls that were nonetheless cheerfully rouged. Eyes outlined in the same color as the shawl measured them up.
"Hiya, Duo. Who's this?"
The gaze on Wufei was piercing, astute and measuring to a fault. Wufei adopted the same neutral look he'd used with Karl. He knew it made him look cold and a bit arrogant, but it was better than coming across as defensive.
Chris tossed his long locks, dyed black, over his shoulders (on reflection, Wufei felt pretty sure it was a man, though he wouldn't have bet his life on it). "He's cute," the creature announced, not making Wufei feel very flattered. "New Blade? What happened to Heero?"
Wufei started slightly at his friend's name.
"Heero's...not here," Duo said. Once again, he sounded a bit more pained than annoyed. "Long story. Outside stuff."
"He okay?" Chris asked. There was genuine concern in the brown eyes as they returned to Duo.
"Yeah, he'll be fine. This is Wufei. He's new."
"I know," Chris put in dryly. "I'd remember that pretty face if I'd seen it before. Damn, Maxwell, isn't it bad enough you're the cutest thing on this colony, you got to dangle some more attractive goods I can't have under my nose?"
Face neutral, Wufei reminded himself.
"That's life, Chris." Duo smirked. "Say, can I have some liquorice?"
"You got some just the other day," Chris said, thick brown eyebrows, like a pair of combed caterpillars, raised questioningly.
"I need some straight stuff. No boosters. You got that, right?"
"I got that, sugar. What's wrong, Chris's little bundles of comfort not doing their job anymore?"
Duo grinned his most winning smile. "I love 'em more than ever, Chris, you know that. It's for Wufei, he'd rather not have anything interfere with his sword arm, yanno?"
"Ah." Once more the eyes tracked over Wufei inch by inch, from his sword, to his face, to the collar, to his stance. "Okay, I can swing that. Just a sec."
Chris put down his knitting and picked up a small confectionary bag. Wufei had taken a quick overall measure of the cart as they'd approached. The merry colors and decorations framed a dozen big bottles and crates full of sweets. The words 'Chris's Candy Shop' were painted on the cart's side. Chris reached into a small box, drew out some liquorice roots and put them into the bag. Wufei lost sight of things then as he suddenly noticed that the bottle next to that one contained brightly colored pills. The big glass jar next to that contained some more of the liquorice sticks which, he remembered abruptly, were not as innocent as they appeared. They were interspersed with bottles full of homemade candy canes and bonbons - well, they looked homemade. And they looked like candy, though at this point Wufei wanted forensic evidence of that.
It was a struggle to keep the neutral look on his face as he remembered the kids playing nearby. He stared at the predator with his brightly colored 'candy shop' and wished he could actually do something about it. He felt repulsed that Maxwell would even stop here.
Chris passed the packet of sticks to Duo, who handed them to Wufei. After a second of frozen immobility, Wufei forced himself to reach out his hand and take the things. Duo led him away with a wave back at Chris. "I'll chat later, gorgeous. I'm barely keeping a-flight now, I'm so tired. Gonna go bunk. Stay safe!"
"Sure. You stay warm now," Chris replied with a cheerful leer.
Wufei followed Duo stiffly through the streets. A loud rattle echoed around the buildings, ringing through the empty space and around the metal streets and alleys; another cargo train passing over their heads.
"Relax, man. It's not as bad as you think."
Duo's voice had been so soft that Wufei barely heard it over the metallic clanging filling the sector's empty spaces.
"What?"
"Chris. It's not as bad as you think. Most of those pills are homemade homeopathic meds for sleeping or digestion, or some very mild shit."
Wufei lowered his head and glanced around, alarmed.
"No, don't worry, you held your cool remarkably well," Duo continued with a smirk, as if reading his mind. "But Heero had the same reaction and I'm ready to bet you two are wired pretty much the same way, hm?"
"Oh." They were in an empty stretch and the echoes of their voices still muffled by the train rattling over their metal ceiling, so Wufei leaned over and chanced a hiss. "Tell me, Maxwell, does he also -"
"She."
"Whatever. Does she also sell this 'mild shit' to the kids?"
Duo's reaction was immediate, a sudden tension and a hiss. He took a sidestep and, to Wufei's shock, put an arm around the Preventer's shoulders, dragging him near. The gesture was companionable, Wufei realized after a mental stutter of surprise. They probably looked like a couple of friends talking quietly over the noise.
"Wu..." Duo glanced around. "Look, don't...ah, never mind, we'll deal with that later. Don't ask any more questions, okay? And no, Chris would never give any drugs to a kid. She's a responsible citizen. A well-respected figure in this sector as a matter of fact."
Wonderful. The friendly local drug dealer.
"One more stop. I gotta pick up my boots from Madir. He should have them repaired by now.’
Duo dropped the arm he had around Wufei's shoulders and headed off on a side-trip again. He twisted down two alleys between buildings and fetched up in a small courtyard. There were rows of big metal shelves along one side and a workbench on the other. The man behind the bench was looking at the courtyard entrance as they came in, alerted by their steps ringing against the metal of the streets outside. He was tall, big-boned with stooped shoulders. His coffee-colored skin was tainted with the sallow tone characteristic of a lack of UVs. A scar nearly bisected his nose giving it a bulbous, spongy appearance.
"Oh, Maxwell, you're back," he murmured.
"Hi, Madir. You got my boots ready?"
"Yeah. Shouldn't look too bad. You gonna be wearing 'em down to the soles again?" Madir's eyes had skipped over Duo to fasten onto Wufei.
"I'll do my level best," replied Duo with a smirk.
"Lemme check them. Glue should be dry. 'Bout time you changed them though."
"I can't!" Duo seemed honestly horrified at the idea. "Me n' those boots go way back!"
"Yeah, I'm sure yer mam wore them, you little spacer rat," said Madir with a snort.
Wufei stiffened, but Duo just laughed. "Nah, Mad, it was your mom who gave them to me. Why do you think I'm so attached to 'em?"
"Attached to 'em? She was that good a lay?"
"'Course not, they were my payment, and man, I earned 'em!"
Face neutral, Wufei reminded himself again.
While Duo and Madir continued to exchange endearments and checked the repaired soles of a pair of black boots, Wufei felt a prickle of eyes on his neck. He glanced discreetly over his shoulder. A kid, seventeen or thereabouts, had poked his head out of the second story window and was staring at him. It was the same stare Chris had given him. Wufei couldn't think of anything he'd done to attract so much attention. Unless it was the collar? But the boy turned the same look on Duo a few seconds later. Duo, true to form, felt it immediately despite the distance. He twisted around while rearranging the boots in his arms. Instead of being discreet like Wufei, Duo stared at the kid directly. The kid didn't glance away and they measured each other for a short while. Then Duo went back to talking with Madir as if nothing had happened.
Footsteps alerted Wufei. He turned from the kid, who was staring at him again, to see a young woman enter the courtyard and stop a few feet away. She started to scrutinize him too. Wufei fought to keep the unreadable look on his face; if it wasn't the collar that was making him stand out, then he was having grave doubts about his cover. The woman continued to stare at him, completely unabashed. There didn't appear to be any hostility in her gaze. Wufei found himself returning it almost aggressively and her eyes didn't even flicker.
Just as Wufei wondered if he was going to have to embark on a staring contest, Duo finished his civilities with Madir - Wufei had stopped listening when he heard the term 'goat' - and stepped away from the workbench. The woman took Duo's place, nodding to Madir who suddenly looked a whole lot more polite. She had a baby in a carrier on her back, about a year old, chewing on a bright green pacifier. The kid turned the same point-blank stare on Wufei who felt his eyes begin to water.
"C'mon, let's go home," Duo tossed back as he headed out of the courtyard. Wufei, rather unsettled, flinched away from the brat's gaze and followed.
He waited until they were once more on the main thoroughfare which was still mostly empty.
"Duo-"
"Nearly there. We're at the lock. Then we'll be in Makh sector, where I live."
The thoroughfare went through a double airlock, separated by a low corridor of a dozen feet. Both locks were open, though they would slam shut at a drop in air pressure or fire on one side or another. Their footsteps echoed in the corridor. A light at the end shone on a nameplate. Ma-something. Not just 'Makh', but Wufei didn't have time to make out the peeling paint; Duo was accelerating.
They walked for another five minutes. The buildings in this sector were low and sprawled, with junkyards and big courtyards ringed in by chain link fences. Things scurried in the piles of scrap as they passed. Wufei let himself imagine it was simply a few more cats. The streets were nearly deserted. The few passersby all gave Wufei the same long searching stare. Duo must have noticed, but he didn't look particularly worried so Wufei tried to put it from his mind.
Duo headed towards a grey three-story building. There was a man sitting out front in a wheelchair, a plaid blanket over his legs. He was reading a book out loud in old French to a pre-teen sitting on the stoop. He looked up as they approached. The same gun-barrel gaze was leveled at Wufei, who was beginning to get used to it.
"Hey, Duo, you're back. Who's this?" He had a thick accent Wufei couldn't place. Maybe L3's Slavic population.
"This is Chang Wufei. As you can see, he's my new Blade." Duo reached over, snagged Wufei's shoulder and shoved him forward like he was showing him off. The man squinted up at him and Wufei noticed a faint scar crossing one eye. The blue cornea was dim.
"Wufei, this is Gilla," Duo continued. His hand was squeezing Wufei's shoulder almost painfully, a reminder not to bow or nod or say anything. It was hard, especially when Gilla himself waved a greeting.
"Hi, Wufei. Nice to have you here. Not that I want to pry, Duo, but where's-"
"Heero isn't available. For the conceivable future. Unless things change," Duo replied curtly.
"Himno, did he go and get married?"
"Er, no." Duo looked blank. "What on earth made you think-"
"He just struck me as the kind who could easily get entangled with a woman and not be able to get himself disentangled short of strangling her. So he's either married, in the army or in jail." Gilla nodded wisely. His voice was deep with a cultured tone that sounded out of place here compared to the other citizens of Freeport Wufei had met, including Duo for that matter. The young girl by Gilla's side, sitting on a ragged pillow, still hadn't said anything, though she was staring at Wufei as if memorizing his features for a future police line-up. Wufei wasn't all that surprised by now. Apparently this was the Freeport norm. He returned the gaze somewhat resignedly. Her features looked more mature than he'd first thought. She was probably older than his initial estimate of six years old, just small for her age. She was wearing brown pants, rolled up at the cuffs to fit her, with pink knit pantyhose beneath and a pair of dirty sneakers. Her jumper might have been blue once. It had faded to mottled grey with washing and was also a bit big for her. But her hair and face were scrupulously clean, and she didn't look malnourished. Or strung out for that matter, Wufei reflected gloomily, remembering some of his more depressing trips to Amsterdam and Neo-Tokyo.
"No, don't worry. Heero and I had a little disagreement, you might say." Wufei thought he caught a flash of a look thrown his way. Duo had said that in a rather dry manner. He'd apparently not forgiven Heero for the inconsiderate hospital stay that had left him with Wufei on his hands.
"Oh, I see. And this young man...?"
"Is also an old friend. Bit of the same story, really."
"Hmm." Gilla scrutinized Wufei again. He had the same gaze as Karl, slightly hostile, as if he wasn't sure he trusted Wufei and intended to keep an eye on him. It wasn't very promising. It was also a bit puzzling that he'd shown no signs of this suspicion when he'd first greeted the Preventer.
"Gonna go hit the sack, Gill. Been up for longer n' I can count at this point. Stay safe. You too, little bit."
The girl's serious countenance broke into a startlingly bright smile for one short second, then she was back to gazing at Wufei as if she suspected him of having stolen her puppy. Wufei followed Duo into the building's interior with some relief.
"I live in the back. I have the yard to myself, too. It's enclosed, not that that makes it any warmer. Except if I have an engine running, and then it's warm and stinks up the place." Duo's voice bounced around the corridor like the braid bouncing against his tan jacket. Wufei stared at it, hypnotized by the swaying motion in his current state of fatigue.
"This door is to Gilla's. This door is to Babka's." Duo jerked a thumb at two doors on either side of the hallway. A few feet further, two similar doors also received an introduction. "This is the toilet, and this is the shower room. The whole building uses them. The guys upstairs said they didn't mind, and it saves us from having to set up and maintain a water pump. Water pressure is kinda lame most days anyway. I won't tell you to spare the water, you're colony-born."
"Yes," Wufei answered belatedly. Duo was already on another subject.
"-will have a job to finish at some point in the next three days. Don't know how long it'll take me." Duo opened a door at the end of the hallway, still talking.
A flick of the switch near the door lit the neon over a small kitchen area immediately to their right. It was delimited by a long metal table with a cubical fridge beneath it, a microwave, cheap kitchen cabinets against the wall, some shelves holding a few condiments, a plastic basket of cutlery and three plates. A small high stainless-steel sink stood close to the kitchen area. It looked oddly out of place to the tired Preventer until he realized it was the same model as the ones found in shuttles. Duo must have salvaged it and played with the plumbing. The mirror above it was cracked, but both looked clean.
The rest of the room was dimly illuminated by the neon and splashes of streetlight sneaking through locked steel shutters of a window to their left. A second door in the opposite wall, of strong steel with a good lock, must lead to the yard Duo had mentioned. A window beside it was also shuttered and let no light through.
A metal worktable ran along the whole left side of the room. Several toolboxes lay open around a half-dismantled mechanism. Wufei took a second, longer look at it, and walked over with a gathering frown.
"Maxwell-"
"Construction mecha," Duo cut in with the heavy sigh of one who's used to being unfairly put upon.
"Really? Looks like the stabilizer unit of an Aries to me," said Wufei, hands fisted on his hips as he scowled at the mechanism.
"That might be where we got it from," Duo admitted vaguely as if searching his memory. When Wufei looked at him the blue eyes were teasing. You're in the middle of Freeport, Lawman, they said. Whatcha gonna do about it?
"We patch up our mechs with whatever we can get our hands on, Chang. If it makes you feel any better, we don't have any of the suit's weapons here," Duo continued, his voice generous and slightly condescending. "This place is enough of a disaster area without waving around things that could blow chunks out of the hull."
Since there was no way for Wufei to verify that, he'd have to take Duo's word for it. He doubted he'd have the luxury of investigating this, though in theory he should. Freeport arming with mobile suits took precedence even over Carver. He'd keep his eyes open, but in the balance of evidence, he did tend to trust Duo. The man might be a bit mercenary and something of a fighting fool, but he'd sacrificed just as much as the other pilots had, putting himself between two armies to defend the colonies and stop the slaughter. Wufei didn't think Duo Maxwell would be party to starting a new war.
There were two swivel chairs in front of the worktable, the only seating available in the place. Apparently Duo ate at his workbench or on the bed. Two metal cupboards stood against the opposite wall to the right of the entrance, and there was a small bookcase full of books, vids, and computer disks next to the bed.
Ah, the bed. The double bed. With two pillows. Wufei managed not to look at it too pointedly, though since that was it as far as furniture was concerned - not even a couch - it was obvious there was nowhere else to sleep. He wondered again what might be between Duo and Heero, and more importantly, whether Duo expected them to share the bed too.
Duo was already ferreting around one of the cupboards. He drew out a rolled-up mat and a sleeping bag. Wufei felt torn; relieved at not having to share sheets with a man he hadn't known for over five years, but a bit disappointed too. So much for sleeping in a bed again. Damn.
"Here, set yourself up- well, wherever you want to, really. Avoid the worktable area unless you want to get woken up by soldering sparks one of these mornings."
Wufei opted to bunk down against the far wall under the window, halfway between Maxwell's bed and the workspace. It wasn't the most comfortable of setups, but the sleeping bag looked warm, and Wufei had roughed it out in worse. He laid out the mat and bag, dropped his knapsack next to them, put down his sword and glanced around, taking stock. So this was going to be his base of operations for the next few weeks. In just this one small room with Duo, his workbench, and -
He looked around a second time, then a third, more carefully.
"You don't have a TV?"
"No, buddy, sorry." Duo was unpacking his duffel, heaping clothes carelessly into one of the metal cupboards. "Reception out here is crap, there's more static on Freeport's incoming vid channels than there is data packets. Nothing much interesting on anyway. The news comes in through the 'net. I play movie vids on my laptop if I have the time, and a few sectors have big screens where they retransmit the games from L2 on high-band linked for that purpose. S'got a twenty-second delay, but it's better than nothing. Hope you have a friend back home recording your favorite shows, or you'll be missing out."
Well well, maybe Freeport had one small solitary thing to recommend itself for after all.
A yawn behind Wufei preceded a sleepy announcement: "I've been up and around for way too long, Chang. How about you? You tired?"
"Yes," Wufei answered shortly. "I've not slept since- for awhile." He'd been trying not to think about the situation he'd left behind. The riots still simmering, the problems with the governor of X953, and Heero still in the hospital. Hopefully Barton would be able keep on top of all that. Wufei rather wished he could have delayed this trip for a day or two, just to make sure Heero was okay. Head wounds could be tricky. But he'd not been given an option. Besides, by their best estimates Carver had returned to Freeport two weeks ago, just as the riots on L2- X953 were getting into full swing, fleeing the trouble like a rat leaving a burning ship. Wufei didn't need to give the killer any more time to dig himself deeper into Freeport.
He caught one of the pillows Duo tossed him and sat down on his makeshift 'bed', arms around his knees. "What are our steps now? How are we going to find Carver? Do you have any idea where to start looking?" Then, on reflection, and in a lower voice: "Can we talk here?"
Duo glanced around automatically. "Yeah. Babka's a bit deaf and Gilla's mostly out front. The inner walls are kinda thin though, so don't start preaching about law and order at the top of your lungs." Duo snickered at Wufei's stony look. "We'll worry about Carver tomorrow. Just follow me around, keep your mouth shut and watch my back. That's all Trowa wants you to do." The latter was said with thinly veiled irony.
Wufei grunted - then he flinched and glanced up automatically at the ceiling as a distant racket heralded the passage of another freight train. As far as assignments went, this one was shaping up to be one of the worst. He just hoped he'd be able to stick Carver in jail by the end of it. That'd make it somewhat worthwhile.
"You hungry?" Duo had tossed his tan jacket on the end of the workbench and was toeing off his steel-capped boots near the door.
"No." Wufei had given up on the liquorice, not liking the slight buzz that came with it. The smell wasn't too bad here, or else he'd gotten used to it, but its remnants and the fatigue were making him a little nauseous. "Do you have anything to drink?"
Duo wandered over in his socks to the small fridge and opened it. "Soda, juice, filtered water. You wouldn't like the stuff they have on tap here."
"Juice."
"Yessir. Note that normally you should be the one getting this for me," Duo pointed out, though not very strenuously. He took out a couple of bottles, opened them by levering the tops off against the counter, and walked over to Wufei with another yawn.
Wufei took the bottle with a grunt of thanks and caught Duo's right hand at the same time, stopping him from straightening up and pulling away.
Duo's initial flinch of surprise gave way to indifference. He said nothing as Wufei examined the black glove and the fingers he'd captured.
"When did this happen?" Wufei asked.
For a moment he thought Duo wouldn't answer and he let go, trying to think of something to say.
"Two years. Bit more now," Duo finally replied. He dangled his bottle by the neck with three fingers of his right hand and used the left to shove up the cuff of his long-sleeved shirt. The skin-tight black glove went up past the elbow. It had a band around the top that glinted metallically in the light from the kitchen. Duo's fingers twisted around it and the band released with a soft click.
Wufei stirred, feeling uncomfortable. "You don't have to-"
"I take it off to sleep," Duo informed him, rolling the glove down. The metallic band had left red spots on his biceps; pressure points from electrodes. There were others further down too, on his forearm.
Bottle and glove in the left hand, he held up the right, fingers splayed. The little finger had been shorn off at the first joint, leaving only a reddened stump. The right ring finger had been cut off at the second knuckle, a triangle dip showing where the joint had been removed. There was more scarring, rough pink pits in the flesh along the side of the hand, the other fingers and his arm.
"Looks like shrapnel damage," Wufei hazarded, a bit puzzled.
"Coulda been. Explosion in a feeder tube on a half-built ship in Zero-G. I was lucky, really. My colleague got one eye and part of his face blown away, and the engineer had her legs broken. Found shards of her kneecaps ensconced in the bulwark. Still walks with a hella limp. I got off easy."
"But you can't steady a gun anymore," Wufei pointed out bluntly. He doubted Duo had ever needed anything sugarcoated in his life.
"Well, I wouldn't get my hands on one in Freeport anyway. I can still pull a trigger outside. When Heero and I go chasing people in the outer satellites, I use a sawed-off shotgun. Subtle it ain't, but it gets their attention." Duo's grin was wide, open and quite savage.
"The glove gives me some mobility and grip," he added, waving it around gently. The fingers that corresponded to his missing digits were still full. Prosthetics, activated by the muscles and nerve inputs in the arm, transmitted by wiring in the glove. They moved in good synchronicity with the intact fingers, but to a trained warrior like Wufei, they'd stood out already back in Scythe, as soon as he'd seen Duo touch his instruments. "I was pretty good with my left hand already. It don't slow me down much. 'S funny, ain't it?"
"What is?"
Duo turned around, stuffing the glove into his back pocket. "You and me, we came through the war pretty much intact, compared to Heero and Trowa at any rate. It's the peace that mangled us."
"Very ironic," Wufei agreed, unlacing his boots with one hand.
"Quatre's the only one of us who's kept his baby-fine skin intact till now."
Quatre has his scars on the inside, Wufei thought as he finished his orange juice. He watched Duo through his eyelashes as the smuggler removed the other glove and sat in one of the chairs. Duo seemed to have taken his injuries with the same uncaring acceptance Wufei had. Neither of them had ever expected the universe to give them a break just because the war was over.
He tugged off his boots and rummaged in the knapsack full of Heero's clothes. He remembered Duo packing a pair of sweats in there. He took them and one of his t-shirts and toiletries and headed towards the door.
"You'll have to use this sink here." Duo was looking blindly at the shuttered window while he toyed with his bottle of juice. "The toilets and showers don't have any."
"Oh." Wufei headed towards the toilet anyway, then came back and brushed his teeth in the tiny sink. He nodded numbly as Duo headed out the door, saying something about 'dumping a load too'. Wufei changed his clothes quickly, his eyes fixed on the mat and the sleeping bag, which were looking very attractive by now. He heard Duo's voice in the hallway and Gilla's deep rumbling bass in return. He didn't wait but slipped into the bag.
His eyes shut before his head even touched the pillow. Two weeks sleeping when he could, a few hours at a time while the riots shook the colony L2-X953 and its neighbors. Then no sleep once Heero had been injured. Wufei had held the fort, done what he had to do while Une and Trowa were in transit and before the riots could escalate into a full-blown revolution. He'd snatched only a few hours on the shuttle on his way to the RV with Duo; he'd been intent on reading up on Carver, preparing for the new mission. And then...His mind lost itself trying to calculate his average sleep time in the past two weeks. It kept coming up with a number that was too ridiculous to contemplate.
Soft noises in the background of the darkness that was nibbling at his consciousness. Duo. Getting ready for bed. Coming near him.
"Wufei? You asleep already?"
Wufei couldn't open his eyes. He grumbled 'yes', or at least that was his intent. It came out as barely a grunt.
"That's what I thought."
Wufei sank into sleep, though a part of him stayed alert, feeling Duo still standing over him. Staring down at him with the same assessing look that had confronted Wufei all day...others were standing behind Duo: Chris, Madir, the young mother and Gilla, all staring -...no, wait...Wufei realized distantly that he had his eyes closed, so he couldn't be seeing them...he was dreaming already...
"It's gonna be a pain draggin' you around Freeport, Wuf." The whisper was no louder than the dream encasing him. "Not to mention a health hazard. And I expect you to have a coronary at some point."
Coronary...coroner...corner...
"Still...it's good to see you again."
End Part 4
Part 5
Link to all chapters
I met my love by the gas works wall
Dreamed a dream by the old canal
Kissed a girl by the factory wall
Dirty old town
Dirty old town
Heard a siren from the docks
Saw a train set the night on fire
Smelled the spring on the smokey wind
Dirty old town
Dirty old town
--- 'Dirty Old Town', The Pogues
Freeport by Maldoror
Chapter Four
"Welcome to Freeport!" Duo exclaimed with a sweeping gesture as if he were giving Wufei the colony on a platter. "What do you think?"
Wufei looked up and down the long corridor. "I think I've seen more attractive submarines."
Duo snickered as if that answer had been everything he'd expected it to be, and walked away with a wave of his hand inviting Wufei to follow.
Their steps echoed in the wide hallway. It was as badly lit as the docking ring: a long tunnel with wires running along the unpainted wall, with the occasional crop of crude light bulbs sprouting out of the tangled vines of cables. The floor beneath their feet was steel with metal lattices down the centre under which ran pipes of various girths, coded for water, high-power lines and sewage in corroded colors.
They passed dozens of doors leading to other docking rings to reach a huge open-sided elevator. Further down the corridor, men and women bundled in long coats and mittens put boxes and crates onto a wide electric cart, but nobody looked their way as the elevator clunked and started to rise.
They were in complete darkness for fifteen long seconds as the elevator climbed through the thick floor separating the docking ring and the section above. Then they were through. The elevator didn't stop; it continued to inch its way up the wall, slowly revealing another part of Freeport to the newcomer's eyes.
Wufei tried hard to keep his customary inscrutable expression as he leaned against the elevator's guardrail and looked out into the huge sector around them.
"You okay?" Apparently his attempt to keep his surprise off his face had been only partially successful. Duo was examining him. "You look like your eyes and nose are itching. Smell's pretty bad here, heh?"
Yes, it was. The chemical reek was choking as they rose above Freeport's industrial zone.
Freeport had been a working penitentiary at its beginnings. Wufei had absently envisioned a workshop full of license plates or something on that scale. Apparently the colony had expanded on whatever it had been bequeathed when it had gained its independence. The industrial sprawl dropping slowly below them was immense.
The yards and buildings were lit by harsh white floodlights. The remaining shadows were peppered with smaller lights, red for warning and green for emergency exits amidst yellow streetlights. Huge factories echoed with the bang of manufacture, the roar of turbines and the growl of heavy machinery. Instead of chimney stacks, pipes sprung from the buildings like arteries; they pumped the poisoned air to a huge filter unit the size of a house, hissing and belching out vapor, the hot air mingling with the cool temperatures of the colony. From the heavy chemical stench prickling the insides of Wufei's nose, Freeport had considered it an unwanted luxury to filter out anything other than the truly toxic chemicals.
A hiss and rich golden-red glow caught his attention. A few buildings away from where their elevator crawled up the wall, a huge vat of molten metal had tipped its contents into long molds manipulated by cranes. Making steel girders, he guessed, though it was hard to tell. A waft of scorched metal scent drifted over the two observers. The steel sparked and flamed in the molds, turning cherry red as it cooled. It was like the third of the ten levels of Hell, Wufei thought a bit fancifully; the level traditionally reserved for felons, drug traffickers, tomb robbers, fences and rioters. How very appropriate.
Duo spat out a piece of the chewed up stick he'd been gnawing at and spoke loudly over the din: "The stuff we need for the shipyards is shipped from other colonies, but we cut costs by making some components here. And other stuff for Freeport itself, like pipes and metal panels and shit."
"Is that a chemical plant?" Wufei asked, his eyes fixed on a building at the edge of the colony's 'horizon'. It was ringed with a complex array of long pipelines, tanks and distillation vats.
Duo leaned past him to look, almost too late to catch a glimpse of it before it was hidden by the colony's curve as the elevator rose higher. "Looks like it."
"Good gods, Maxwell, that violates every rule of- of fundamental security-" Wufei closed his lips tightly, remembering the insane waltz of ships outside, each a potential threat that could crash into the colony at any time. Right. Freeport apparently had fairly loose standards that way.
"It ain't nothing real volatile. We don't allow that on the colony." The elevator had dragged them through another floor, obliterating their view of the huge space below and plunging them into near-darkness again, relieved only by the dim lighting of the elevator's buttons and emergency exit sign. "Anything explosive is kept on the mining satellites or in floating refineries out in space, same as other colonies."
Wufei remembered the tiny figures scurrying around the yards, driving trucks, working around those pipelines and vats of molten metal. Whatever Duo said, he was rather glad to not be in their place. Being on the same colony was going to be bad enough.
"Nearly there." Duo was looking upwards where a dim light promised the end of the elevator ride. "Then we can take the shuttle to the living quarters."
So they wouldn't have to walk? Good. Wufei was getting tired. It wasn't only the past two weeks that were catching up with him; he'd been pushing the envelope this past year and, hard as it was to admit it, he wasn't fifteen any more.
He shouldn't have to feel like an old veteran just because he was now twenty, but he remembered his younger self when he'd first joined the Preventer's Special Unit as another man entirely. Riots, unrest, multiple plots...he'd faced them all with the zeal of someone recently and finally converted to the ideals of Peace. The unrest had lasted over a year, but then things had started to quiet down. The lessening tension had felt like a reward for their hard work, a promise that things were really improving. Humanity had learned its lesson.
But then last year, riots and trouble had started to boil up again in the colonies and some hot-spots on Earth. Mainly L3 and L2, with a few of the L4 mining colonies thrown in. Wufei had spent over a month hunting down gunrunners in L3, trying to keep the situation from erupting into something worse, and then he'd been doing extreme riot control for Une in L2. And those two weeks on L2-X953. If he never saw that particular colony again, he'd die a happy man. At this point he didn't care if he was in Freeport or in Hell: he just wanted to get to where they were going and sleep in a bed for the first time in over eight days.
The elevator left them in a wide bay. On one side was an elevator pod waiting to take passengers through a hole in the ceiling, going up into one of the spokes leading to the Zero-G docking bay at the axis of the colony. Duo walked past it and stopped at the edge of a platform besides several sets of train tracks which vanished into the darkness of a tunnel on either side of the bay. There was no one else around. They'd barely made it to the platform when a noise down the tunnel announced the train's arrival.
It was automated, with only two wagons behind a small engine. Four people were sitting together in the first wagon, but Duo got into the second empty one. Wufei followed him to a set of hard plastic benches.
"Maxwell, where are we going to start looking for-" the train started and completely drowned Wufei's words. There had been no attempt to soundproof the train's carriages or do much about suspension. Wufei felt his teeth rattle, and he grabbed the edge of his seat to avoid being bumped off. After a few seconds the train's rhythm eased and the ride was a bit smoother, but it was still too noisy for conversation.
They rode without a word for a few minutes. The train slowed and stopped a couple of times. Two people got on at one of the stops, going into the other carriage. Wufei didn't have the patience to continue grilling Duo during the few seconds of respite from the noise.
Another stop and someone entered their carriage. Wufei observed him discreetly. Male, late twenties, medium height, thick build, black hair, dressed in protective gear soiled with oil and marks of solder wiped off on his thigh...
Wufei's skin prickled as he realized that the man was staring at him, then at Duo. The Preventer shifted, making sure his scabbard wasn't blocked by the seat. Before he could get truly concerned, the man looked away and tossed his hard hat on a bench five rows ahead of them before sitting down. Wufei glanced at Duo. The latter was chewing his liquorice with a sleepy air. If he was disturbed by the factory hand's unexpectedly intense scrutiny, he didn't show it.
The train shook in a bone-jarring bump over a set of points. Wufei looked out the grimy plastic window in time to see the open doors of a massive airlock pass them by. They must be entering the half of the wheel that contained the living quarters. The airlock was there to isolate it from the industrial zone in case of a serious fire or explosions, a thought that wasn't really all that reassuring.
The ride became smoother, the noise faded to less-than-deafening level, not that Wufei felt at leisure to talk with the stranger sitting nearby.
"Here, this is our stop," Duo announced, nudging Wufei. "We'll go through Volt, it's faster and I want to drop by Chris's stand."
Wufei followed numbly, trying to shake some feeling back into his body, nerves deadened by the vibrations. His ears rang as the train pulled away. He followed Duo to yet another airlock.
"You're not afraid of heights, right?" Duo tossed over his shoulders as he led Wufei through a low tunnel.
"Of course not," Wufei muttered.
"Good." A door opened with a wheezy automatic creak as they approached. They stepped through it and out onto a large skirt of metal over a drop of several hundred feet, dimly lit by the ever-present yellow and red bulbs.
"What..." Wufei realized there was an elevator platform slowly rising to meet them. "This goes all the way through to the outer hull?"
"Yeah. There's one of these shafts every three or four sectors of the living quarters. There are two levels in this part of Freeport. The outer level of the wheel is storage, pumps, filters, recyc, hydroponics, all that sorta stuff. The middle section is the living quarters, and the highest level is the shuttle tunnel."
"Oh." Wufei glanced around. The elevator platform was still some distance away and there was no one around. "Duo, what exactly am I supposed to know? As your, er, Blade?"
"You heard what I told Karl. You're new in Freeport, and a new Blade too. That means you're allowed a number of dumb questions, and hopefully it'll give you some leeway if you screw up." Duo looked like he was rather expecting it. Wufei throttled an acrid remark. "Keep in mind, though: people who come to Freeport...well, they already know about it. Hell, I practically lived off Freeport legends in the fucking godawful slums I grew up in, and so have most people who managed to make their way here. There's stuff all spacers like me know about. And you..."
Duo gave him a look at that point. It was steady, measuring and slightly dismissive.
"You are rather misinformed," Duo finished, looking away again.
Wufei could feel his hackles rise, though he couldn't deny Duo's words. He didn't actually know all that much about Freeport except for rumors and legends, and those were mainly about the lawlessness and criminal underworld that thrived here. Wufei had been too busy on Earth and the more orderly colonies to worry about Freeport these last few years. Before that, Freeport was a haunt of low-lives and pledge-breakers that the scion of an honorable colony would know nothing about.
They stepped out onto the platform as it ground to a halt with a thump at their level. It was ten feet by fifteen, big enough to carry small cargo, open on the side with only thin guardrails protecting its passengers from the drop below.
Wufei was about to ask another question when a noise interrupted him. It grew louder, a grinding, chugging, hissing uproar echoed around the metal walls like a drum being relentlessly pounded. Wufei had his hand on his sword's hilt, a gesture of defense ingrained into his bones however useless in this instance. He stared wildly at the ceiling above their head, remembering the ships dancing around the colony's wheel-
"Cargo train!" Duo shouted above the noise.
Oh. Wufei stood down with a shudder. In his mind's eye the chemical plant was exploding, sheeting the colony's air with fire and gasses; ships were tearing into the hulls; all the space debris outside was pounding through the walls...
"Get many incidents of space mania in this dump?" he asked as the racket above their heads faded with a distant rhythmic clacking of wheels on tracks.
Duo simply shrugged.
The elevator crawled down a few more feet. Wufei stared around him. Apparently the lack of lighting was generalized. The darkness was oppressive.
"What's the suicide rate?" Wufei added a bit snidely.
"What you got to realize is that most people in Freeport have as many lives as a cat, and they spent over half of them getting here," Duo said, nibbling his stick with every appearance of unconcern. "Space puppies like us tend not to let the wibblies go to our head."
"The lives of a cat? Then by any reasonable estimate, you have a tab running, Maxwell."
Duo smiled proudly, but his reply was cut by a ringing thump coming from below, followed by a ratcheting clatter.
"And so has Freeport," Wufei added, his voice a bit hoarse. "What was that?"
"Someone moving a cargo pod down below," Duo answered without glancing around. His eyes were still on Wufei, weighing. "All this gonna be a problem for you, Chang?"
"I was born and raised on a colony," Wufei reassured him stiffly. And to be honest, A0206 had been pretty dilapidated too. Wufei had grown up, like most space-born citizens, in an environment where a sharp metallic 'ping' could be the sound of a gasket breaking, a seal breaching, the start of the invasion of the void that surrounded them and tried to rip them apart at the seams every second of their lives. All colonists lived with that constant feeling of vulnerability, with the ever-present precautions they had to take, with the knowledge that if something went wrong there would be no second chances and probably not even a first. They lived at the mercy of vacuum and that was notoriously merciless.
The pressure broke some people down, reduced to wrecks by the constant inescapable knowledge of their own human frailty in an environment that was as ultimately as hostile to them as it could get. The incidence of space mania had decreased steadily in the last two decades on civilized colonies, where some effort was spent on mimicking earth conditions; fake skies, day and night cycles, artificial breezes and as much nature as the colony could afford. But the human mind couldn't always be fooled. Those who succumbed to the phobia either went back to earth or ended up in a psych ward. But Wufei had learned to live and fight in space. He had his flaws, but that one, fortunately, had never been one of them.
- a second grinding thump echoed up from the shaft, followed by a deep, creaking noise -
Until now, a small part of Wufei amended. It was the part that had had the nightmares when he was seven, after his parents had been killed in a shuttle accident. It knew what vacuum victims looked like...But he reined in the memories. This wouldn't be a problem. The mental discipline of the warrior would keep him focused even as the survival instincts of the colonist were telling him to get the hell out of this deathtrap already.
The elevator platform stopped after dropping seventy feet, and they stepped off. Another airlock protected the living quarters. It hissed open to a waft of air and the scent of a lot of people living in close proximity.
The sector was darker than any night on earth could ever be. The ceiling was invisible above their heads. The streets were lit by harsh white neon, nearly blue in their intensity; space lighting, the kind his colony had only used in hangars and docking rings. They sliced the eternal night of the streets into monochrome chunks.
But the scene they illuminated was not the one Wufei had expected. He'd envisioned a seedy slum, lit up in all the colors of an oil slick by neon advertising bars and strip joints. Freeport's air was rich with the smell of a rather inadequate sewer system and the chemical tang that had followed them from the industrial zone, but the stench of rotten garbage, piss, vomit and misery were absent.
The habitations were the expected pre-fabricated easy to assemble boxes found on most colonies, though Wufei had never seen such a heteroclite bunch brought together. It looked like Freeport had scrounged them together from every end-of-line sale there'd ever been. The buildings stood four to six stories high on either side of the wide streets and nearly touching the invisible ceiling.
Their steps echoed as they wound their way through the prefabricated canyon. Everything was metal here, no care had been taken to hide the fact they were in a glorified tin can floating through space. A dribble of steam eased out from under a manhole cover, air warmed by the sewage system beneath it escaping into the ambient chill.
A cat, thin and feral as a rat, paused as it crossed the street to eye them coldly before disappearing into a crack between two buildings. Junk had been stacked there with odd neatness and order; bed frames, broken chairs, a smashed computer screen, cracked cupboards, pots of paint...After the next block was another open space lined with benches. A seesaw and a sandpit were being ignored by the kids playing there, though apparently not by another cat which was carefully digging away at the sand. The three children were dressed in grey and tattered woolen jumpers against the cold. They were involved in a violent game of tag that involved a lot of horseplay and screaming. Their voices bounced around the buildings, shrill and loud before being completely drowned out by another clatter from up above, a bit more muffled than in the elevator shaft but still ominously present. Wufei tensed. The kids didn't even pause in their game or glance upwards. An elderly man on a bench watched the children without interfering in the rough-housing. He appeared to be darning socks. He had a whole stack of them next to him, and he split his attention between the children and his needle.
Duo walked down the street with his usual assured gait. Wufei followed more slowly, observing everything while keeping up a pretense of disinterest. There were no shops that he could see. Maybe this was just the 'dorm' section of the colony. A few citizens leaned out the windows or sat on stoops, talking. They watched the two men pass with an open curiosity which surprised and worried the Preventer. These inhabitants didn't look like layabouts. They were dressed in thick workman's pants, jumpers or coats, and he didn't see any of them drinking or taking anything illicit. Damn, Wufei remembered, taking the liquorice stick out of his mouth to glare at it, at this point I'm more of a disreputable figure than they are.
"Just stopping at Chris's stand," Duo said over his shoulder. He turned down a road perpendicular to the main thoroughfare. A few carts had gathered halfway down the street, metal frames cobbled together with cheap plastic boarding, small enough for one person to push around without too much trouble. They were gaily decorated with colored paper and paint, the first splash of vivid color Wufei had seen in Freeport apart from the arterial red of warning lights. A couple of women loitered nearby, talking to one of the stall vendors in the low, intense voices of gossips everywhere.
Duo drew up before the most colorful of the carts. There was something colorful behind the cart, too. Wufei, with mission-born concentration and culturally ingrained restraint, managed not to stare. Chris, if that was him - her? - was a thickset person in vivid red overalls with an electric blue shawl over round shoulders. Bulky fingers worked some knitting needles, turning grey wool into a thick-knit tube. He... she?...seemed to have a good five o'clock shadow going on thickset jowls that were nonetheless cheerfully rouged. Eyes outlined in the same color as the shawl measured them up.
"Hiya, Duo. Who's this?"
The gaze on Wufei was piercing, astute and measuring to a fault. Wufei adopted the same neutral look he'd used with Karl. He knew it made him look cold and a bit arrogant, but it was better than coming across as defensive.
Chris tossed his long locks, dyed black, over his shoulders (on reflection, Wufei felt pretty sure it was a man, though he wouldn't have bet his life on it). "He's cute," the creature announced, not making Wufei feel very flattered. "New Blade? What happened to Heero?"
Wufei started slightly at his friend's name.
"Heero's...not here," Duo said. Once again, he sounded a bit more pained than annoyed. "Long story. Outside stuff."
"He okay?" Chris asked. There was genuine concern in the brown eyes as they returned to Duo.
"Yeah, he'll be fine. This is Wufei. He's new."
"I know," Chris put in dryly. "I'd remember that pretty face if I'd seen it before. Damn, Maxwell, isn't it bad enough you're the cutest thing on this colony, you got to dangle some more attractive goods I can't have under my nose?"
Face neutral, Wufei reminded himself.
"That's life, Chris." Duo smirked. "Say, can I have some liquorice?"
"You got some just the other day," Chris said, thick brown eyebrows, like a pair of combed caterpillars, raised questioningly.
"I need some straight stuff. No boosters. You got that, right?"
"I got that, sugar. What's wrong, Chris's little bundles of comfort not doing their job anymore?"
Duo grinned his most winning smile. "I love 'em more than ever, Chris, you know that. It's for Wufei, he'd rather not have anything interfere with his sword arm, yanno?"
"Ah." Once more the eyes tracked over Wufei inch by inch, from his sword, to his face, to the collar, to his stance. "Okay, I can swing that. Just a sec."
Chris put down his knitting and picked up a small confectionary bag. Wufei had taken a quick overall measure of the cart as they'd approached. The merry colors and decorations framed a dozen big bottles and crates full of sweets. The words 'Chris's Candy Shop' were painted on the cart's side. Chris reached into a small box, drew out some liquorice roots and put them into the bag. Wufei lost sight of things then as he suddenly noticed that the bottle next to that one contained brightly colored pills. The big glass jar next to that contained some more of the liquorice sticks which, he remembered abruptly, were not as innocent as they appeared. They were interspersed with bottles full of homemade candy canes and bonbons - well, they looked homemade. And they looked like candy, though at this point Wufei wanted forensic evidence of that.
It was a struggle to keep the neutral look on his face as he remembered the kids playing nearby. He stared at the predator with his brightly colored 'candy shop' and wished he could actually do something about it. He felt repulsed that Maxwell would even stop here.
Chris passed the packet of sticks to Duo, who handed them to Wufei. After a second of frozen immobility, Wufei forced himself to reach out his hand and take the things. Duo led him away with a wave back at Chris. "I'll chat later, gorgeous. I'm barely keeping a-flight now, I'm so tired. Gonna go bunk. Stay safe!"
"Sure. You stay warm now," Chris replied with a cheerful leer.
Wufei followed Duo stiffly through the streets. A loud rattle echoed around the buildings, ringing through the empty space and around the metal streets and alleys; another cargo train passing over their heads.
"Relax, man. It's not as bad as you think."
Duo's voice had been so soft that Wufei barely heard it over the metallic clanging filling the sector's empty spaces.
"What?"
"Chris. It's not as bad as you think. Most of those pills are homemade homeopathic meds for sleeping or digestion, or some very mild shit."
Wufei lowered his head and glanced around, alarmed.
"No, don't worry, you held your cool remarkably well," Duo continued with a smirk, as if reading his mind. "But Heero had the same reaction and I'm ready to bet you two are wired pretty much the same way, hm?"
"Oh." They were in an empty stretch and the echoes of their voices still muffled by the train rattling over their metal ceiling, so Wufei leaned over and chanced a hiss. "Tell me, Maxwell, does he also -"
"She."
"Whatever. Does she also sell this 'mild shit' to the kids?"
Duo's reaction was immediate, a sudden tension and a hiss. He took a sidestep and, to Wufei's shock, put an arm around the Preventer's shoulders, dragging him near. The gesture was companionable, Wufei realized after a mental stutter of surprise. They probably looked like a couple of friends talking quietly over the noise.
"Wu..." Duo glanced around. "Look, don't...ah, never mind, we'll deal with that later. Don't ask any more questions, okay? And no, Chris would never give any drugs to a kid. She's a responsible citizen. A well-respected figure in this sector as a matter of fact."
Wonderful. The friendly local drug dealer.
"One more stop. I gotta pick up my boots from Madir. He should have them repaired by now.’
Duo dropped the arm he had around Wufei's shoulders and headed off on a side-trip again. He twisted down two alleys between buildings and fetched up in a small courtyard. There were rows of big metal shelves along one side and a workbench on the other. The man behind the bench was looking at the courtyard entrance as they came in, alerted by their steps ringing against the metal of the streets outside. He was tall, big-boned with stooped shoulders. His coffee-colored skin was tainted with the sallow tone characteristic of a lack of UVs. A scar nearly bisected his nose giving it a bulbous, spongy appearance.
"Oh, Maxwell, you're back," he murmured.
"Hi, Madir. You got my boots ready?"
"Yeah. Shouldn't look too bad. You gonna be wearing 'em down to the soles again?" Madir's eyes had skipped over Duo to fasten onto Wufei.
"I'll do my level best," replied Duo with a smirk.
"Lemme check them. Glue should be dry. 'Bout time you changed them though."
"I can't!" Duo seemed honestly horrified at the idea. "Me n' those boots go way back!"
"Yeah, I'm sure yer mam wore them, you little spacer rat," said Madir with a snort.
Wufei stiffened, but Duo just laughed. "Nah, Mad, it was your mom who gave them to me. Why do you think I'm so attached to 'em?"
"Attached to 'em? She was that good a lay?"
"'Course not, they were my payment, and man, I earned 'em!"
Face neutral, Wufei reminded himself again.
While Duo and Madir continued to exchange endearments and checked the repaired soles of a pair of black boots, Wufei felt a prickle of eyes on his neck. He glanced discreetly over his shoulder. A kid, seventeen or thereabouts, had poked his head out of the second story window and was staring at him. It was the same stare Chris had given him. Wufei couldn't think of anything he'd done to attract so much attention. Unless it was the collar? But the boy turned the same look on Duo a few seconds later. Duo, true to form, felt it immediately despite the distance. He twisted around while rearranging the boots in his arms. Instead of being discreet like Wufei, Duo stared at the kid directly. The kid didn't glance away and they measured each other for a short while. Then Duo went back to talking with Madir as if nothing had happened.
Footsteps alerted Wufei. He turned from the kid, who was staring at him again, to see a young woman enter the courtyard and stop a few feet away. She started to scrutinize him too. Wufei fought to keep the unreadable look on his face; if it wasn't the collar that was making him stand out, then he was having grave doubts about his cover. The woman continued to stare at him, completely unabashed. There didn't appear to be any hostility in her gaze. Wufei found himself returning it almost aggressively and her eyes didn't even flicker.
Just as Wufei wondered if he was going to have to embark on a staring contest, Duo finished his civilities with Madir - Wufei had stopped listening when he heard the term 'goat' - and stepped away from the workbench. The woman took Duo's place, nodding to Madir who suddenly looked a whole lot more polite. She had a baby in a carrier on her back, about a year old, chewing on a bright green pacifier. The kid turned the same point-blank stare on Wufei who felt his eyes begin to water.
"C'mon, let's go home," Duo tossed back as he headed out of the courtyard. Wufei, rather unsettled, flinched away from the brat's gaze and followed.
He waited until they were once more on the main thoroughfare which was still mostly empty.
"Duo-"
"Nearly there. We're at the lock. Then we'll be in Makh sector, where I live."
The thoroughfare went through a double airlock, separated by a low corridor of a dozen feet. Both locks were open, though they would slam shut at a drop in air pressure or fire on one side or another. Their footsteps echoed in the corridor. A light at the end shone on a nameplate. Ma-something. Not just 'Makh', but Wufei didn't have time to make out the peeling paint; Duo was accelerating.
They walked for another five minutes. The buildings in this sector were low and sprawled, with junkyards and big courtyards ringed in by chain link fences. Things scurried in the piles of scrap as they passed. Wufei let himself imagine it was simply a few more cats. The streets were nearly deserted. The few passersby all gave Wufei the same long searching stare. Duo must have noticed, but he didn't look particularly worried so Wufei tried to put it from his mind.
Duo headed towards a grey three-story building. There was a man sitting out front in a wheelchair, a plaid blanket over his legs. He was reading a book out loud in old French to a pre-teen sitting on the stoop. He looked up as they approached. The same gun-barrel gaze was leveled at Wufei, who was beginning to get used to it.
"Hey, Duo, you're back. Who's this?" He had a thick accent Wufei couldn't place. Maybe L3's Slavic population.
"This is Chang Wufei. As you can see, he's my new Blade." Duo reached over, snagged Wufei's shoulder and shoved him forward like he was showing him off. The man squinted up at him and Wufei noticed a faint scar crossing one eye. The blue cornea was dim.
"Wufei, this is Gilla," Duo continued. His hand was squeezing Wufei's shoulder almost painfully, a reminder not to bow or nod or say anything. It was hard, especially when Gilla himself waved a greeting.
"Hi, Wufei. Nice to have you here. Not that I want to pry, Duo, but where's-"
"Heero isn't available. For the conceivable future. Unless things change," Duo replied curtly.
"Himno, did he go and get married?"
"Er, no." Duo looked blank. "What on earth made you think-"
"He just struck me as the kind who could easily get entangled with a woman and not be able to get himself disentangled short of strangling her. So he's either married, in the army or in jail." Gilla nodded wisely. His voice was deep with a cultured tone that sounded out of place here compared to the other citizens of Freeport Wufei had met, including Duo for that matter. The young girl by Gilla's side, sitting on a ragged pillow, still hadn't said anything, though she was staring at Wufei as if memorizing his features for a future police line-up. Wufei wasn't all that surprised by now. Apparently this was the Freeport norm. He returned the gaze somewhat resignedly. Her features looked more mature than he'd first thought. She was probably older than his initial estimate of six years old, just small for her age. She was wearing brown pants, rolled up at the cuffs to fit her, with pink knit pantyhose beneath and a pair of dirty sneakers. Her jumper might have been blue once. It had faded to mottled grey with washing and was also a bit big for her. But her hair and face were scrupulously clean, and she didn't look malnourished. Or strung out for that matter, Wufei reflected gloomily, remembering some of his more depressing trips to Amsterdam and Neo-Tokyo.
"No, don't worry. Heero and I had a little disagreement, you might say." Wufei thought he caught a flash of a look thrown his way. Duo had said that in a rather dry manner. He'd apparently not forgiven Heero for the inconsiderate hospital stay that had left him with Wufei on his hands.
"Oh, I see. And this young man...?"
"Is also an old friend. Bit of the same story, really."
"Hmm." Gilla scrutinized Wufei again. He had the same gaze as Karl, slightly hostile, as if he wasn't sure he trusted Wufei and intended to keep an eye on him. It wasn't very promising. It was also a bit puzzling that he'd shown no signs of this suspicion when he'd first greeted the Preventer.
"Gonna go hit the sack, Gill. Been up for longer n' I can count at this point. Stay safe. You too, little bit."
The girl's serious countenance broke into a startlingly bright smile for one short second, then she was back to gazing at Wufei as if she suspected him of having stolen her puppy. Wufei followed Duo into the building's interior with some relief.
"I live in the back. I have the yard to myself, too. It's enclosed, not that that makes it any warmer. Except if I have an engine running, and then it's warm and stinks up the place." Duo's voice bounced around the corridor like the braid bouncing against his tan jacket. Wufei stared at it, hypnotized by the swaying motion in his current state of fatigue.
"This door is to Gilla's. This door is to Babka's." Duo jerked a thumb at two doors on either side of the hallway. A few feet further, two similar doors also received an introduction. "This is the toilet, and this is the shower room. The whole building uses them. The guys upstairs said they didn't mind, and it saves us from having to set up and maintain a water pump. Water pressure is kinda lame most days anyway. I won't tell you to spare the water, you're colony-born."
"Yes," Wufei answered belatedly. Duo was already on another subject.
"-will have a job to finish at some point in the next three days. Don't know how long it'll take me." Duo opened a door at the end of the hallway, still talking.
A flick of the switch near the door lit the neon over a small kitchen area immediately to their right. It was delimited by a long metal table with a cubical fridge beneath it, a microwave, cheap kitchen cabinets against the wall, some shelves holding a few condiments, a plastic basket of cutlery and three plates. A small high stainless-steel sink stood close to the kitchen area. It looked oddly out of place to the tired Preventer until he realized it was the same model as the ones found in shuttles. Duo must have salvaged it and played with the plumbing. The mirror above it was cracked, but both looked clean.
The rest of the room was dimly illuminated by the neon and splashes of streetlight sneaking through locked steel shutters of a window to their left. A second door in the opposite wall, of strong steel with a good lock, must lead to the yard Duo had mentioned. A window beside it was also shuttered and let no light through.
A metal worktable ran along the whole left side of the room. Several toolboxes lay open around a half-dismantled mechanism. Wufei took a second, longer look at it, and walked over with a gathering frown.
"Maxwell-"
"Construction mecha," Duo cut in with the heavy sigh of one who's used to being unfairly put upon.
"Really? Looks like the stabilizer unit of an Aries to me," said Wufei, hands fisted on his hips as he scowled at the mechanism.
"That might be where we got it from," Duo admitted vaguely as if searching his memory. When Wufei looked at him the blue eyes were teasing. You're in the middle of Freeport, Lawman, they said. Whatcha gonna do about it?
"We patch up our mechs with whatever we can get our hands on, Chang. If it makes you feel any better, we don't have any of the suit's weapons here," Duo continued, his voice generous and slightly condescending. "This place is enough of a disaster area without waving around things that could blow chunks out of the hull."
Since there was no way for Wufei to verify that, he'd have to take Duo's word for it. He doubted he'd have the luxury of investigating this, though in theory he should. Freeport arming with mobile suits took precedence even over Carver. He'd keep his eyes open, but in the balance of evidence, he did tend to trust Duo. The man might be a bit mercenary and something of a fighting fool, but he'd sacrificed just as much as the other pilots had, putting himself between two armies to defend the colonies and stop the slaughter. Wufei didn't think Duo Maxwell would be party to starting a new war.
There were two swivel chairs in front of the worktable, the only seating available in the place. Apparently Duo ate at his workbench or on the bed. Two metal cupboards stood against the opposite wall to the right of the entrance, and there was a small bookcase full of books, vids, and computer disks next to the bed.
Ah, the bed. The double bed. With two pillows. Wufei managed not to look at it too pointedly, though since that was it as far as furniture was concerned - not even a couch - it was obvious there was nowhere else to sleep. He wondered again what might be between Duo and Heero, and more importantly, whether Duo expected them to share the bed too.
Duo was already ferreting around one of the cupboards. He drew out a rolled-up mat and a sleeping bag. Wufei felt torn; relieved at not having to share sheets with a man he hadn't known for over five years, but a bit disappointed too. So much for sleeping in a bed again. Damn.
"Here, set yourself up- well, wherever you want to, really. Avoid the worktable area unless you want to get woken up by soldering sparks one of these mornings."
Wufei opted to bunk down against the far wall under the window, halfway between Maxwell's bed and the workspace. It wasn't the most comfortable of setups, but the sleeping bag looked warm, and Wufei had roughed it out in worse. He laid out the mat and bag, dropped his knapsack next to them, put down his sword and glanced around, taking stock. So this was going to be his base of operations for the next few weeks. In just this one small room with Duo, his workbench, and -
He looked around a second time, then a third, more carefully.
"You don't have a TV?"
"No, buddy, sorry." Duo was unpacking his duffel, heaping clothes carelessly into one of the metal cupboards. "Reception out here is crap, there's more static on Freeport's incoming vid channels than there is data packets. Nothing much interesting on anyway. The news comes in through the 'net. I play movie vids on my laptop if I have the time, and a few sectors have big screens where they retransmit the games from L2 on high-band linked for that purpose. S'got a twenty-second delay, but it's better than nothing. Hope you have a friend back home recording your favorite shows, or you'll be missing out."
Well well, maybe Freeport had one small solitary thing to recommend itself for after all.
A yawn behind Wufei preceded a sleepy announcement: "I've been up and around for way too long, Chang. How about you? You tired?"
"Yes," Wufei answered shortly. "I've not slept since- for awhile." He'd been trying not to think about the situation he'd left behind. The riots still simmering, the problems with the governor of X953, and Heero still in the hospital. Hopefully Barton would be able keep on top of all that. Wufei rather wished he could have delayed this trip for a day or two, just to make sure Heero was okay. Head wounds could be tricky. But he'd not been given an option. Besides, by their best estimates Carver had returned to Freeport two weeks ago, just as the riots on L2- X953 were getting into full swing, fleeing the trouble like a rat leaving a burning ship. Wufei didn't need to give the killer any more time to dig himself deeper into Freeport.
He caught one of the pillows Duo tossed him and sat down on his makeshift 'bed', arms around his knees. "What are our steps now? How are we going to find Carver? Do you have any idea where to start looking?" Then, on reflection, and in a lower voice: "Can we talk here?"
Duo glanced around automatically. "Yeah. Babka's a bit deaf and Gilla's mostly out front. The inner walls are kinda thin though, so don't start preaching about law and order at the top of your lungs." Duo snickered at Wufei's stony look. "We'll worry about Carver tomorrow. Just follow me around, keep your mouth shut and watch my back. That's all Trowa wants you to do." The latter was said with thinly veiled irony.
Wufei grunted - then he flinched and glanced up automatically at the ceiling as a distant racket heralded the passage of another freight train. As far as assignments went, this one was shaping up to be one of the worst. He just hoped he'd be able to stick Carver in jail by the end of it. That'd make it somewhat worthwhile.
"You hungry?" Duo had tossed his tan jacket on the end of the workbench and was toeing off his steel-capped boots near the door.
"No." Wufei had given up on the liquorice, not liking the slight buzz that came with it. The smell wasn't too bad here, or else he'd gotten used to it, but its remnants and the fatigue were making him a little nauseous. "Do you have anything to drink?"
Duo wandered over in his socks to the small fridge and opened it. "Soda, juice, filtered water. You wouldn't like the stuff they have on tap here."
"Juice."
"Yessir. Note that normally you should be the one getting this for me," Duo pointed out, though not very strenuously. He took out a couple of bottles, opened them by levering the tops off against the counter, and walked over to Wufei with another yawn.
Wufei took the bottle with a grunt of thanks and caught Duo's right hand at the same time, stopping him from straightening up and pulling away.
Duo's initial flinch of surprise gave way to indifference. He said nothing as Wufei examined the black glove and the fingers he'd captured.
"When did this happen?" Wufei asked.
For a moment he thought Duo wouldn't answer and he let go, trying to think of something to say.
"Two years. Bit more now," Duo finally replied. He dangled his bottle by the neck with three fingers of his right hand and used the left to shove up the cuff of his long-sleeved shirt. The skin-tight black glove went up past the elbow. It had a band around the top that glinted metallically in the light from the kitchen. Duo's fingers twisted around it and the band released with a soft click.
Wufei stirred, feeling uncomfortable. "You don't have to-"
"I take it off to sleep," Duo informed him, rolling the glove down. The metallic band had left red spots on his biceps; pressure points from electrodes. There were others further down too, on his forearm.
Bottle and glove in the left hand, he held up the right, fingers splayed. The little finger had been shorn off at the first joint, leaving only a reddened stump. The right ring finger had been cut off at the second knuckle, a triangle dip showing where the joint had been removed. There was more scarring, rough pink pits in the flesh along the side of the hand, the other fingers and his arm.
"Looks like shrapnel damage," Wufei hazarded, a bit puzzled.
"Coulda been. Explosion in a feeder tube on a half-built ship in Zero-G. I was lucky, really. My colleague got one eye and part of his face blown away, and the engineer had her legs broken. Found shards of her kneecaps ensconced in the bulwark. Still walks with a hella limp. I got off easy."
"But you can't steady a gun anymore," Wufei pointed out bluntly. He doubted Duo had ever needed anything sugarcoated in his life.
"Well, I wouldn't get my hands on one in Freeport anyway. I can still pull a trigger outside. When Heero and I go chasing people in the outer satellites, I use a sawed-off shotgun. Subtle it ain't, but it gets their attention." Duo's grin was wide, open and quite savage.
"The glove gives me some mobility and grip," he added, waving it around gently. The fingers that corresponded to his missing digits were still full. Prosthetics, activated by the muscles and nerve inputs in the arm, transmitted by wiring in the glove. They moved in good synchronicity with the intact fingers, but to a trained warrior like Wufei, they'd stood out already back in Scythe, as soon as he'd seen Duo touch his instruments. "I was pretty good with my left hand already. It don't slow me down much. 'S funny, ain't it?"
"What is?"
Duo turned around, stuffing the glove into his back pocket. "You and me, we came through the war pretty much intact, compared to Heero and Trowa at any rate. It's the peace that mangled us."
"Very ironic," Wufei agreed, unlacing his boots with one hand.
"Quatre's the only one of us who's kept his baby-fine skin intact till now."
Quatre has his scars on the inside, Wufei thought as he finished his orange juice. He watched Duo through his eyelashes as the smuggler removed the other glove and sat in one of the chairs. Duo seemed to have taken his injuries with the same uncaring acceptance Wufei had. Neither of them had ever expected the universe to give them a break just because the war was over.
He tugged off his boots and rummaged in the knapsack full of Heero's clothes. He remembered Duo packing a pair of sweats in there. He took them and one of his t-shirts and toiletries and headed towards the door.
"You'll have to use this sink here." Duo was looking blindly at the shuttered window while he toyed with his bottle of juice. "The toilets and showers don't have any."
"Oh." Wufei headed towards the toilet anyway, then came back and brushed his teeth in the tiny sink. He nodded numbly as Duo headed out the door, saying something about 'dumping a load too'. Wufei changed his clothes quickly, his eyes fixed on the mat and the sleeping bag, which were looking very attractive by now. He heard Duo's voice in the hallway and Gilla's deep rumbling bass in return. He didn't wait but slipped into the bag.
His eyes shut before his head even touched the pillow. Two weeks sleeping when he could, a few hours at a time while the riots shook the colony L2-X953 and its neighbors. Then no sleep once Heero had been injured. Wufei had held the fort, done what he had to do while Une and Trowa were in transit and before the riots could escalate into a full-blown revolution. He'd snatched only a few hours on the shuttle on his way to the RV with Duo; he'd been intent on reading up on Carver, preparing for the new mission. And then...His mind lost itself trying to calculate his average sleep time in the past two weeks. It kept coming up with a number that was too ridiculous to contemplate.
Soft noises in the background of the darkness that was nibbling at his consciousness. Duo. Getting ready for bed. Coming near him.
"Wufei? You asleep already?"
Wufei couldn't open his eyes. He grumbled 'yes', or at least that was his intent. It came out as barely a grunt.
"That's what I thought."
Wufei sank into sleep, though a part of him stayed alert, feeling Duo still standing over him. Staring down at him with the same assessing look that had confronted Wufei all day...others were standing behind Duo: Chris, Madir, the young mother and Gilla, all staring -...no, wait...Wufei realized distantly that he had his eyes closed, so he couldn't be seeing them...he was dreaming already...
"It's gonna be a pain draggin' you around Freeport, Wuf." The whisper was no louder than the dream encasing him. "Not to mention a health hazard. And I expect you to have a coronary at some point."
Coronary...coroner...corner...
"Still...it's good to see you again."
End Part 4
Part 5