(Photo by ZCH)

With more people needing jobs than there were jobs to be given out, Chester found it surprising that they were all being put to work. He wondered if the job scarcity was really as bad as he thought it was, or if a special exception was being made for them. In either case, it wasn’t making him and the others very popular with the rest of the lunar population. Word spread far more quickly than Chester would have expected and before the day was out there were small groups of people gathered outside of the cramped hab block they’d been given to live in.

Chester sat in the one common room in the hab, eating with his drones. A few of them chatted but Chester remained quiet. Only an idiot would assume they could speak freely without worry of being overheard or spied on so he kept his real conversations limited to the neural connection.

“So far they’re just standing around,” Lyon told Chester as he watched the crowed outside through the window. “I don’t see any weapons either.”

“Doesn’t mean they aren’t concealing them,” Chester remarked, thinking about the coat he’d worn earlier with the rifle concealed inside of it.

“Lunar security should be here soon anyway and that’ll likely clear them away,” Lyon assured him but he didn’t move away from his position looking out the window.

“Are they really going to just let you join them?” Chester asked.

“Both Doreb and I worked for the royal palace security,” Lyon said. “If anything, we’re overqualified for lunar security.”

“But they’re going to trust you and everything?”

“I doubt they’ll trust us,” Lyon chuckled. “We’ll get assigned to the worst patrols or maybe to doing desk work. Whatever no one else wants to do, basically.”

“Well, find out what you can. Anything and everything that could help us get off the moon and someplace safe will be invaluable.”

“Understood,” Lyon nodded. “Where’d they assign you?”

“I’ll be working maintenance,” Chester said. “During the night shift.”

“Ugh, that sounds miserable.”

“It’s a trap is what it is,” Chester told him.

“How so? You think the quartermaster’s going to try and have you killed while you’re working?”

“No, if she wanted me dead she could have just ordered security to come and arrest us all before throwing us out an airlock. The real trap is that by putting me in maintenance she’s giving me access to nearly the entire colony. She’ll have me tracked to see if I go someplace other than my assigned areas and from there she’ll figure out what I’m up to.”

“So no neural gel?”

“It means I have to be even more careful if I’m going to make any,” Chester said. “I need you to figure out what the security camera distribution is. If you can, figure out what sort of observation is going on in this hab. If they’re just listening and not watching us then I might be able to build my lab in here.”

“What about the chemicals you need?”

“I’ll have everyone keeping an eye out for those, if they even have them here.”

The conversation fell into a lull. It was only then that Chester became fully aware of the food he was eating. Bland was a good description of it, which, given the state of the lunar colony, wasn’t too bad. Food that lacked much taste was far superior to food that tasted terrible, or worse, rotten.

A basic sort of bread and a thin soup had been given to them. There were a few attempts at chopped vegetables in the soup along with a hint of seasonings and a few lentils, but overall it wasn’t much.

“Enough to survive off of, eh?” Sigurd said aloud, raising his bowl in a mock toast.

“It’s better than what I ate during the Solar King’s conquest,” Chester said. “So eat it and don’t complain.”

Chester had to make sure he kept up appearances. If he was too quiet, too detached from the rest of the group then it would seem too suspicious. At least, that was his theory. He also wanted to give Quartermaster Cosa more to think about. If she knew he had lived through the conquest wars then perhaps she’d be more likely to believe his story about refusing to work for the Solar King.

“What was it like back then?” Sigurd asked Chester. “Before the Solar King, I mean.”

Most of the other conversations in the room quieted down as the attention all turned towards Chester.

“I don’t generally talk about that,” he said, feeling his body tense and his heart rate increase.

“We know,” Sigurd said gently, “but we’d still like to know. You’ve said life was better since the Solar King came to power, that even the worst of what we’ve experienced isn’t as bad as it was back then.”

“It was,” Chester’s voice was barely more than a whisper. “There were a dozen little rulers on each planet back then, all of them fighting each other for whatever resources they could get. They’d assassinate one another, kill a competitors workers, steer asteroids into collision courses with rival planets to make their own goods more valuable. And the outposts were even worse. Little colonies where only the very top leadership had any sort of freedom. I met an old woman who grew up on a refueling asteroid colony where they’d dump anyone who was too old, sick, or injured to work out of the airlock. Apparently there was a small ring of corpses that orbited the station and they’d have to go out and push them away whenever the ring got too thick.

“The Solar King was brutal but at least he kept the peace. It isn’t paradise, but when you compare things to how they use to be? It makes the fringes complaints about poor trade agreements sound petty.”

The others in the room bristled at that and Chester was quick to calm them back down.

“That doesn’t mean I don’t think things should be improved even more,” he said before any of the others could speak. “The core planets have always been favored over the fringe and people suffer because of that. All I’m saying is that none of you know just how bad it can be. How bad war is.”

“Sometimes you have to make sacrifices,” Sigurd said, “in order to get something better. If I have to live through a war so that the next generation can have a better life, well, I think that’s worth it.”

“That’s fine for you but what about the billions who’re living in the fringe now?” Chester asked. “Do they all share your opinion? Or are you forcing a war on them that they don’t want? And,” Chester went on without letting Sigurd or anyone else speak, “don’t forget about what happened to the floating cities.”

There was a pause and then Vinay cocked his head to one side, his brows furrowed.

“What floating cities?” he asked with genuine confusion.

Chester looked around the room for someone else who knew what he was talking about but everyone, even Lyon and Doreb looked confused.

“How do you not know about them?” Chester asked. “They were the main rivals to the Solar King when he was beginning his conquests. Each of the gas giants boasted dozens of floating cities. Their gas refineries were what made them so wealthy and powerful.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call the hydrogen mines cities,” Sigurd laughed and shook his head at the absurdity of the idea.

“I agree,” Chester replied. “Those aren’t even a shadow of what use to fly across those worlds. The Solar King destroyed them all, forcing them to crash into the deadly clouds until they were crushed by the pressure. Never to be rebuilt. Only small gas mines have been allowed by the Solar King, even though the floating cities were a more efficient method of extraction.”

“I grew up on a gas mine colony,” Vinay said. “I’ve never heard of any floating cities.”

Chester shrugged. It would make sense for the Solar King to control what parts of history got to be told and what parts didn’t, but Chester assumed the people who were most stringently against the Solar King would have done more research into the past, if only to find more reasons to resist the Solar King.

“Find anyone who was alive back then,” he told them. “The floating cities were the real power in the solar system before the Solar King. We all knew about them and dreamed of one day getting to travel there. The fringe was the place to be back then. It was still terrible for everyone who wasn’t already rich and powerful but at least we could dream about going there and getting away from our own personal suffering.”

They all finished their meal in silence after that and before long, security arrived to take Lyon and Doreb. That did, in fact, scare away the crowd outside and after that the rest of Chester’s drones all went off to their new jobs as well. Only Chester was left behind. His work wouldn’t begin until evening.

Being alone for the first time in a good while, Chester stretched out and tried to calm his mind. A nap was what he really needed, and then he could begin focusing again on his plans. Sleep was a tool, he reminded himself, one he forgot to take advantage of as often as he should.

With that, he closed his eyes and let himself drift off. If he was lucky he’d have no dreams. He loved it when he didn’t dream. That was always the best sleep.