Free Solaris Rising 1.5 by Ian Whates

warehouses covered the ground between him and the vertical settlements on the far wall, clustered to either side of the meltwater stream that ran from the mountains at one end of the canyon to the sea at the other. Napoleon looked left and right, trying to orientate himself. He wasn’t familiar with this part of town. His old stamping grounds were further downstream, towards the port. He’d come this far inland seeking an old flame: the girl he’d ditched twenty years ago, when he’d jumped out of the system en route for Strauli, half-baked on tranquilisers and intending never to return. He brought his ship down in the ocean off the coast, where the canyons met the water, and left it floating there. Then he went looking for her.
    Her name was Crystal. He found her in a small room off a darkened landing, half an hour before Vilca’s men found him.
    “What do you want?” she asked.
    “It’s me, honey. Napoleon.” He took off his hat.
    “I know who you are.”
    “I’ve come to see you. To see how you are.”
    She looked him up and down with contempt.
    “You still look exactly the same,” she said.
    He forced a smile.
    “So do you.”
    Crystal gave a snort. “You always were a lousy liar, Jones.” She stepped back from the door, her heels clicking on the vinyl floor. “You can come on in, if you want.”
    Napoleon hesitated at the threshold, both hands holding the brim of his hat. The room wasn’t much larger than the bed it contained, and dark; and the air smelled of stale sheets.
    “I thought you might have been married.”
    “I was, for a while.” Crystal squeezed her hands together. “It didn’t take.”
    “What happened?”
    She stopped kneading her fingers and wrapped her arms across her ample chest.
    “Why the hell do you care?”
    Napoleon shrugged.
    “Look, I’m sorry—”
    “You’re sorry? You stand there all sorry, not having aged at all. While the rest of us have had to live through the past twenty years .”
    He held up his hands.
    “I just wanted to see how you were.”
    Crystal tossed back her mane of red hair.
    “I’m fat and middle-aged and alone. Are you happy now?”
    Napoleon stepped back onto the landing. While the hyperspace jumps from one star system to the next took the same amount of time as it took light to cross the intervening distance, the jumps themselves felt instantaneous to the crews of the ships making them; so for every light year Napoleon had travelled, a calendar year had worn away here, for Crystal. She’d gone from her mid-twenties to her mid-forties, while he’d only aged by a couple of years.
    “I should be going,” he said, regretting the sentimental impulse that had brought him to her door.
    Her lip curled. She took hold of the door, ready to close it.
    “Yes, go on. Leave. It’s the only thing you’re good at.”
    Napoleon backed off another step.
    “I can see you’re upset—”
    “Oh, just go.”
    She closed the door, leaving him standing alone in the gloom of a solitary overhead fluorescent strip. He could hear her sobbing behind the door. The sound gave him a sick, empty feeling.
    He replaced his Stetson and, hands in pockets, walked back to the stairwell. From there, he went looking for a bar; but before he could find one, Faro and Emilio found him.
    Now, still on the run after his adventures on the zeppelin, and still bleeding heavily from the gash in his arm, Napoleon started making his way through the maze-like shanties on the canyon floor, heading for the transport tube that threaded along the base of the far wall, fifty or so metres away. If he could get there and get on a train, he’d be at the port in no time.
    He staggered forward. The sky was a thin strip of blue, high above. Flyers and zeppelins floated like fish in an undersea trench. Down here at the bottom, a thin frost covered everything. The sun rarely penetrated to this depth.
    The houses were ramshackle affairs. Some were two or three storeys in height. They looked like