The Battle For Cyclops: A Xander Cain Novel Read online

  “You're forgetting fighting, drinking and perhaps, more importantly, cheating. Never go into a contest without knowing you can win, no matter the odds.” Anya cut the deck in two, riffling the halves together. She offered the deck to Xander. “Now you, so our friend can't claim I'm using the same tricks as him.”

  “Tricks!” Alexi threw his hands up. “Tricks she says. Skill more like it, Anya.”

  “Now, now kids. Let’s not fight.” Xander dealt out the cards, sliding across seven to each person. “Rider’s rules, arrows wild.” Xander put four more cards, one for each player, face down in the centre of the table, then scooped up his hand.

  It was an ok hand. A pair of swords, an arrow, one club, one bow, one catapult and a dagger. He rearranged the cards in his hand, putting them into value order, starting with a catapult and ending with the club. Around the table, he could see his friends doing the same. Meg had a look of concern across her face that seemed genuine, so Xander wrote her off as a contender. Neither Alexi nor Anya were giving anything away, their faces stoic as they examined their cards.

  “Is this a good hand? I’m not familiar with this game,” Matthias said.

  Xander ignored him, selecting two cards from his hand. “Oh, I don’t have any chips,” he said, realising he had forgotten to ask about what they were playing for.

  “Not a problem.” Alexi reached into an open locker behind him, rocking back on his chair as he did. He reached inside and removed a stack of chips, all the while keeping his eyes locked forward on the others. “Each chip is ten credits.” Alexi slid the pile across to Xander.

  “Right, I’ll draw two then.” Xander put the club and the dagger face down on the nearest pile in the centre then stacked two chips neatly on top. He took two new ones from the deck. Another catapult and bow. It was a good draw, strengthening his hand.

  “Draw two,” Meg said, playing going anticlockwise from the dealer. She did the same, stacking two cards on the next pile and tossing her chips onto it.

  “Draw two,” Anya said, doing the same.

  “So far, so boring,” Alexi said. “Draw six.” He dumped most of his hand onto the final pile, along with a fat stack of chips. “You have to learn to live dangerously sometimes.”

  “We live dangerously all the time,” Meg said. She put her hand of cards down and tipped the remains of the peanut packet into her mouth. “We’re mercenaries after all,” she mumbled through a mouthful of nuts.

  “Draw two,” Xander said. It was a cautious play, but with arrows wild, he could make his two catapults three. He was aiming for either another catapult or a third bow.

  “I’m not sure I quite understand this,” Matthias said.

  Meg repeated the same action, whilst Anya considered her move more closely.

  “Fine,” she said eventually. “I’ll see your pile.” She slid six chips across the table to Alexi, then picked up his stack of discarded cards, rifling through them. She took one from the pile then replaced it with one of her own. “Interesting.”

  “Is it?” Alexi just grinned smugly. “Draw four.” More chips and cards filled his pile in the centre of the table.

  “Oh, I think I get it, drawing more aggressively costs you more money, and grows the pot accordingly. Then someone can pay you what you’ve paid in directly to look through your discarded cards. Interesting, one would assume that being as aggressive as possible was the best play each time then. There appears to be very little downside,” Matthias said. His musings on the game were missing one vital component.

  “Call,” Xander said counting the total number of chips on the other players' piles and matching them with his own.

  “Fold,” Meg said, slumping back in her chair.

  Anya thought for a moment. Checked her cards, then stared at her two comrades, before returning to her cards again. “Ok, call.” She did the same, matching the other players' bets.

  “Time to face the music,” Alexi said with a grin as he pushed a pile of chips forward. “Come on then, Xander. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Xander laid his cards out in front of him. “Two catapults and an arrow, triple there, a pair of bows and a pair of swords.” He flipped over his discarded pile. “Minus a pair of daggers.”

  “Ah! So, the discarded cards count against you if they form a scoring hand. Interesting.” There was a hint of excitement in Matthias’s voice now he fully grasped the game.

  “Four daggers and a pair of swords,” Anya said. She tossed her cards down then flipped over her discards. “Minus a pair of clubs. You’ve got me, Cain. It’s all down to Alexi now.”

  Alexi chuckled as he shuffled his cards in his hands. The man was all muscle, the cards comically small in his thick fingers. “Two catapults and an arrow, same as Xander. Plus, a bow and an arrow, and a pair of swords. We seem to be evenly matched.” Alexi revealed his discards. Five clubs, plus one of every other card. “Well, seeing as arrows are wild, I’ll have it count as a club here. So that’s minus six points for me, and minus eight points for you. Looks like I win!”

  “How did he do that? The odds of him discarding only multiples of one type of card are almost impossible. I also don’t quite understand this game’s scoring mechanic. Is it multiplicative?” Matthias seemed confused at the outcome.

  “You win, Alexi. Again,” Xander said, standing up from his chair. “I’ll wire you the credits once I’m on the station. You can keep them towards the cost of a new arm the next time you lose one.”

  Anya and Meg whooped and hollered, jeering at Alexi. He had lost an arm on two separate mechsuits whilst on Hades and it had become something of a running joke amongst the group.

  “Fine, as long as I keep winning at cards, I can keep buying new arms.”

  “I just need to work out how he’s cheating,” Anya said. “Maybe we can break one of his real arms and he’ll tell us.”

  Chapter Four

  Xander took a deep breath in through his nose. The station had a strong musty smell, the same one that seemed to fill the air of every guild station. It was the smell born of cramming hundreds of muscle-bound mercenaries into tight metal corridors and plying them with suspicious fried meats and flat warm beers. To Xander, it was the smell of home, even though this was one of hundreds of near-identical stations spread across known space. He had never been on this exact station before, but everything about it was familiar. The low constant hum of the lights, the patina on the walls where stains had never truly been cleaned, the sounds of laughter or an argument echoing the halls, these things were a constant.

  His boots clanked as Xander walked across the deck of the train. The station was a vast ring that spun around a central column that acted as a dock and repair yard. He, along with the rest of his company, had disembarked the Sunchaser, eager for a few days of drinking, gambling, and eating fried foods of dubious quality. A train ran through the arms that connected the spinning section of the station to the centre, making the trip between the two a few minutes at most. Xander put the holdall he was carrying into an overhead compartment, shutting the plastic door with a click, then took his seat. He snapped the seatbelt shut. Until they arrived in the ring there would be no gravity and Xander didn't feel like bouncing around as the train moved.

  Alexi took the seat opposite, whilst Sergei squeezed into the one next to Xander. He was wearing a suit and tie, the outfit at odds with the heavy black magnetic boots he was wearing. Xander had told him it was too formal for the station, but Sergei had just muttered something about appearing professional being important. He had insisted on coming along, the former corporate warehouse manager was in charge of the company’s finances and had stated he should be there for contract negotiations with a confidence that had surprised Xander.

  “This place is a lot…grottier, than I imagined,” Sergei said. “Where’s all the money the guild is making from its dues and fees going?”

  “Ah, that is one of life’s great mysteries,” Alexi said. “Where is all the guild money? Controll
ed by the secret lizard people, maybe? Buried in bullion form in the tunnels of Svarog? Who knows?”

  “Alexi,” Xander said, using the same tone as a parent telling off a child. “It’s no mystery. There are what, four hundred plus of these stations spread across known space? Running that many facilities isn’t cheap.”

  “Honestly using space stations doesn’t really make much sense,” Matthias said. “There has to be a more efficient way of assigning workloads.” The AI liked to talk out loud as it thought. Of course, no one else could hear it, so it was an annoyance Xander had to bear alone. “Maybe a system of buoys…”

  Sergei nodded in agreement at Xander’s statement. “That makes sense. Running the Sunchaser is expensive enough. You know, there are a million different things you never think about. Sure, paying for fuel is obvious, but air? Water? You know every time you take a shower or flush a toilet it costs the company money? That’s before we even get to the expensive stuff like mechsuits and weapons.”

  “Well, that’s why we’re here after all,” Xander said. “To find a new job. That and finally process that stack of paperwork you keep pushing under my nose.”

  “Honestly I never imagined there would be so many forms. I thought corporate red tape was bad. This is something else. You know technically the Sunchaser is a civilian transport? That’s the only way Mikal and his boys can crew it legally until we submit that paperwork.”

  “They’ll love that,” Meg said. She and Anya had taken up the seats behind the boys. “Gone from pirates doing illegal unlicensed merc work, to actual card-carrying members of the guild. Going up in the world.”

  “Yes well, those registration fees aren’t cheap. The money from the last job didn’t go quite as far as I would have liked. We’ll need to pick up something well paying here if we’re going to make this an actual, viable, working business.” Sergei adjusted his tie. “I would think people would be jumping at the chance to hire a mercenary company with its own jump capable ship. How many of those could be there be?”

  “In the Iron Belt? Just us probably. The issue is we don't have a reputation, not really,” Xander said. The rumble of the train was dying down as it approached its destination. “Despite Tamara's videos people don't really know us yet. To them, we're some freelancers who got lucky on Hades. We haven't proved ourselves a capable outfit, not really.”

  “So, we’re stuck in a bind. We can’t get a good job, because we’re not well known enough to get…good jobs. Hardly seems fair does it?” Sergei said.

  “You’re a fine one to talk, corporate boy,” Meg said. “When I first became a freelancer, I considered packing it all in, getting a normal job. Every job I looked at wanted years of experience in doing that job. Isn’t that just the same thing? You need experience to get a job, but you can’t get a job because you have no experience.”

  “Well, yes, but you can bypass that a little if you know the interviewer or someone else on the inside. Or you've built up a decent name at the company in a different role.”

  “So, you’re saying reputation matters?”

  Sergei just shrugged his shoulders. Meg had a good point. “We’ll have to find something. We need the money.”

  “I took enough bad jobs for the money as a freelancer,” Alexi said. “This does not feel any different.”

  The train came to a screeching stop as it pulled into the station. There had been a twisting sensation in the stomachs of those on board as the track had curved upwards to match the gentle sweep of the ring. For a few brief moments, it felt like being on a rollercoaster as the train moved from being vertical to horizontal, the centrifugal forces of the spinning ring giving the illusion of gravity.

  “Well, look at it this way, Alexi,” Xander said as he unclipped his seatbelt. He stood up, fishing his holdall out from the overhead. “At least you’re not suffering alone anymore.”

  ***

  Sergei looked at what Xander had just given him like it was radioactive waste. Warm steam was drifting out of a polystyrene container, the lid flipped open to reveal strips of greasy meat stuffed into a bread pocket that overflowed with various sauces, pale green mint and vivid red chilli battling for dominance as they pooled in the bottom of the tray. Alongside that was what was supposedly a salad. Sergei thought it instead looked like a head of lettuce that had seen the horrors of war first-hand and had returned from the front with a shellshocked wedge of lemon in tow.

  “Am I supposed to eat this?” he said, sniffing experimentally at it.

  “Well, it’s not for looking at.” Xander was already stabbing his plastic fork into the meat and slathering it in the deep well of sauce gathering in the corner of his tray.

  “What meat even is this?”

  “Best not to ask. Just get it down you, it’s been a long day.” Xander dangled the flopping meat into his mouth like he was a snake. This was the first he had eaten since breakfast that morning, the day’s tasks taking much longer than expected. It was the exact kind of grease-laden food that Xander had been craving. He turned swiped his credit chip across the terminal the vendor had prodded him in the arm with. In his haste to eat Xander had forgotten to pay. The terminal bleeped happily as the transaction was confirmed.

  “I don’t think any day is this long.” Sergei prodded at the bread which wobbled unsettlingly. He walked over to a nearby bench and sat down, then experimentally skewered some of the meat.

  The promenade was a feature on every guild station. The sheer number of mercenaries visiting at any one time meant there was a constant need for shops, bars and restaurants to serve them. Though occasionally a more high-end establishment would try their luck, most of the businesses operating on the station were of the sort Sergei would have described as rugged. Places where cheap booze was more important than almost anything else. Sergei’s dinner had come from one of a dozen wheeled metal carts that were scattered around, all upsettingly vague about their menu choices. The one they had just walked away from had a long pillar of meat rotating slowly under a heat lamp. Sergei wasn’t sure what animal came in such a perfectly shaped tube of meat, or why it seemed to sweat after being cooked.

  Xander took a seat beside him. The benches had been fitted in an ill-fated attempt to make the station feel more liveable but had done little aside from allowing drunken mercenaries impromptu bedding.

  “It’s not that bad. Ok, well maybe the salad is, but that’s just so you can claim you’ve eaten something green at least.” Xander tried to get comfortable on the bench, shimmying from side to side. To try and curb the problem of people sleeping on them the station management had installed metal studs to the top in an effort to make them uncomfortable, defeating the point of the benches entirely. “I’m glad we got all those licenses sorted, but we haven’t had a chance to look for a new job at all. I never knew it would take so long to stamp some forms.”

  “Stamp, notarise, create paper copies, print licenses, create digital footprints for those licenses, register them for HR-”

  “Yeah, I get the point. Helping you deal with all this was supposed to be Tamara's job. What is she even doing back on the Sunchaser?”

  “Something to do with those webcasts she keeps making. She mentioned wanting to sign some deals with local networks so she can place adverts for them. The station is a hub, after all, lot of inbound and outbound jump ships, so it's a good place to send out requests from,” Sergei said.

  It made sense. Whilst jump ships could cross the stars in the blink of an eye, signals were still constrained by the speed of light. If you wanted to pass on a message you needed it to be carried across the stars in the same way a ship would be. Most systems had buoys near jump points where people could upload messages to be carried to the next system when a jump ship passed through. For some worlds, this meant a message could be unsent for months, and the answer could take even longer.

  “Mr Cain.” A woman stood over Xander. She seemed to have slid into existence from the shadows, slinking into the light. She was wearing
an immaculately cut black suit, the clothes hanging on her like they were stitched directly onto her skin. It was all points and angles, a trait that extended to the woman herself. She looked like she could cut you with her touch alone.

  Sergei nudged Xander with his elbow, excited at the living proof before them that his suit was the right idea after all.

  “Do I know you?” Xander jammed his fork into the lid of his kebab. He knew better than to try eating one when talking to a stranger. Nobody looked professional eating a kebab, that was one of the ineffable truths to the universe.

  “No, but I know you. Miranda Yang, station supervisor.” The woman extended her hand and Xander took it. She had a handshake that was like her, sharp and to the point. “We’ve been expecting you.”

  “Who is we in this scenario?”

  “The guild. Every guild station in the Iron Belt has standing orders for your arrival.”

  “That’s ominous,” Sergei said. “We haven’t done something wrong, have we?”

  “Quite the opposite,” Miranda said. She smiled, her cheekbones jutting like daggers. “We would like to offer you, and your company, a job.”

  A Brief History of The Mercenary Guild

  The Mercenary Guild, colloquially known by most simply as “the guild” is an organisation born of the Corporate Wars. A vast bureaucratic enterprise responsible for the administration of mercenary work across known space, the guild acts as a middleman between corporations and the mercenaries they hire, working to ensure the articles of war are adhered to. Whilst the guild is an independent entity, not technically controlled by the core worlds, it does more to enforce their will in corporate space than any other organisation.

  Mercenaries have existed since before the dawn of recorded history. As long as humans have been fighting amongst themselves there have been groups of people willing to serve on the frontlines in exchange for payment. The first days of recolonising space were no different. When the corporations first left the core worlds to settle the mysteries beyond, they were quickly followed by groups of fighting men and women offering their services to whatever corporation needed them. The mercenaries of this period were normally infantry units, mechsuits not yet invented. In these days groups would administer their contracts with corporations directly, and stories abound from this era of disgruntled mercenaries turning on their employers in retribution for payments not honoured.