1:11

One truth is quite enough. You wouldn’t want it to become a habit. You’ve got a reputation to maintain.

They shake you down before you’re even off the boarding ramp, but you’re expecting it. A job like this, you budget for bribes, and it’s still less than you’d spend on fuel taking the long way round. You pay them what they want and you try not to look too dangerous.

You’re glad you’ve got your knuckles. Your little metal comfort blankets.

Kaliff handles all the actual bargaining. He knows people, and they know people. You let it wash over you as you follow him through murky tunnels coated in so many layers of graffiti you can’t see the rock underneath them. Meaningless profanity, gang marks, bloodstains, ranting scripture, signposts to bars and flophouses, adverts for guns, narcotics, sex. After a time you stop reading them. You don’t need to read them. They accrete on you.

You pass through filthy burrows, gouged from the rock, and trade chips for air filters and oxygen tanks. You meet a blind priest who presides over the back of a stim bar inside the chassis of a broken down excavator, and he sells you some fuel. You don’t ask where he got a full tank of military grade propellant, and he doesn’t tell you. He insists on clasping your face tightly before you leave and blessing you, his breath sweet with ketosis. You share a glass of vat vodka with a mechanic who has a large amount of coffee he needs taking off his hands. When he falls asleep, you pay him anyway. Not full price, of course. You’re not a monster, but you’re…