Free Nemesis by Alex Lamb

kicked off again.
    ‘What is this shit, Jim?’ said Tina. ‘They’re closing all the sampling towers. If my wife and I don’t keep up our booking payments, we’ll lose our flight out. Then it might be what, two more years till the next open berth we can afford comes on the market. What am I supposed to do – sign up as a Revivalist and beg for a posting as a Flag? I’m not spending another two years on this shit-hole planet watching cities get smashed flat, Jim.’
    ‘Nobody here is going to miss their booking payments,’ Jim insisted. ‘Everyone will get their ticket offworld. FiveClan has you covered, remember? Everyone here is Made Gold or higher, am I right?’
    Mark didn’t speak up. He hadn’t invested in any of the Made Premium programmes. But they hardly mattered to him.
    ‘In any case,’ said Jim, ‘could we get back to the agenda, please? And let’s save the questions for the end, okay? On a final positive note, the Princeton operation was a complete success. Management are delighted that we extracted the cores with everyone intact – everyone’s going to receive a quarterly bonus, so kudos to Ricky and his team for all their hard work!’
    Everyone clapped. Those nearest to Ricky slapped him on the back.
    ‘And very special thanks to Mark,’ Jim added, ‘for pulling them out in the nick of time with some incredible flying!’
    The applause slacked off. Some of the clapping grew slow enough to be heavy-handed even for irony. Mark got a couple of sidelong glances.
    He folded his arms. Everyone in the room knew that without him there’d be no bonus, no cores, and everyone on Ricky’s team would be screwed on their booking payments. Fuck them all. This was not what he thought it would be like when he came back to Earth. He wondered for the thousandth time if he’d just picked the wrong city.
    Before he moved he’d heard that, what with all the major urban relocations, sect affiliation didn’t mean much any more. Everywhere was a melting pot these days. Supposedly. He’d realised that was bullshit in week one. Outwardly, Earth’s sects might operate as a bloc, but within Earth society affiliation counted for everything. Everything that wasn’t already determined by class, at least.
    ‘Okay!’ said Jim, trying to hold on to the enthusiasm that had already fled the room. ‘That’s it for now, I guess. Next meeting one week from now. Everyone enjoy your weekend!’
    The engineers started filing out, muttering in small groups.
    ‘Mark, could you stay back a minute?’ Jim added. ‘I’d like to chat about something.’
    Mark watched the others leave with a mixture of resentment and dread. His little chats with Jim had been getting steadily more awkward over the passing months. Jim had sunken, sad-looking eyes in a pale brown face that was always smiling, and you could read his emotion by how much stress that smile was hiding. Today, it hid the most Mark had ever seen.
    Jim waited until the last engineer was gone before speaking.
    ‘Hey, Mark. Look, sorry for the vibe there.’
    Mark shrugged. ‘I did my job. I got them out. If they don’t appreciate it, that’s their problem.’
    ‘Yeah. That’s the thing. Look, Mark, I’ve no idea what to do about this. I know that whole transit pod thing was an accident—’
    ‘What else was I supposed to fucking do?’ said Mark. ‘Leave them to the Shamokin? Just fly away?’
    ‘ Management’s very happy with your choice,’ said Jim, ‘but the guys think … Well, the guys blame management for sending them there in the first place when they should have just let the whole issue slide. And if management ended up having to pay extra to get them out, well, then maybe it would have served them right.’
    ‘Except that’s not how it works, is it?’ said Mark. ‘Management would have found a way to pass the fucking buck, because that’s what they did last time.’
    ‘You know that and I know that,’ said Jim earnestly, ‘but the guys