Jon Carver is a man lost in the far reaches of the universe. A tragic encounter with strange alien forces has left him part man, part living metal. Scraping by as a hired gun on a rundown space station at the edge of civilized space, Carver’s the guy you call when you have a job that no one else wants. It’s not much of a life, but it pays the dock fees on his dilapidated ship.
Now his past has returned with a vengeance. He’s made powerful enemies… enemies intent on destroying all he’s built. To survive, Carver must fight to protect the one thing he holds most dear and maybe save a galactic empire in the process.
Jon Carver is a man lost in the far reaches of the universe. A tragic encounter with strange alien forces has left him part man, part living metal. Scraping by as a hired gun on a rundown space station at the edge of civilized space, Carver’s the guy you call when you have a job that no one else wants. It’s not much of a life, but it pays the dock fees on his dilapidated ship.
Now his past has returned with a vengeance. He’s made powerful enemies… enemies intent on destroying all he’s built. To survive, Carver must fight to protect the one thing he holds most dear and maybe save a galactic empire in the process.
I crouched in the shadows of a ventilation unit, watching the door. Erratic flashes of light strobed overhead, throwing twisted shapes against the alley walls. Damn street kids hacking the dome again. Graffiti marred the simulated night sky and gang signs streaked across its artificial surface. It also explained the unscheduled rain shower.
At least the rain would knock down the pungent stench filling the alley. I don’t know why Central doesn’t pull the plug on the precipitation system altogether. The artificial rain’s supposed to water the vegetation, but nothing grows in South Dome. It was just one more thing making the night miserable.
“If it sucks so much, then why are we here?” Em asked.
I had no concerns she’d be overheard. Her voice is an audible illusion in the back of my head.
“A man’s gotta make a living somehow,” I replied silently.
She can read my thoughts, at least the ones on the surface. She can’t dig down into the dark, ugly stuff. Or maybe she’s just decided it isn’t a place she wants to visit.
The door opened, and a figure stepped out, scanning the alley.
Finally.
I watched him, trying to decide if it was safe to leave the building. It wasn’t.
Em shielded my heat signature, making me invisible to him. I stayed motionless, knowing patience would work in my favor.
“Is that the guy?” I asked.
“He’s a match. Try not to get yourself shot this time.”
“No worries, this one looks like easy money,” I said.
Satisfied, he crept out, closing the door behind him. The bent figure shuffled slowly down the alley. Another flash of light revealed a potbellied, older man dressed in frayed gray overalls. He had sad, drooping eyes, thin gray hair and sagging jowls covered in a weeks’ worth of stubble. He looked more sad than dangerous, but why take the chance?
I rose from concealment and fired two slugs into the center of his back. He hit the mud hard, flailing before going still. I admit to being biased, but I’ll take an old school projectile weapon over a blaster any day.
“Not very sporting,”
“You wanted it clean,” I reminded her, concentrating on the prone figure.
Despite what I’d told Em, experience has taught me that there’s no such thing as an easy job. Approaching cautiously, I kept the barrel of my rifle pointed at the body. I extended a foot to roll him over. With blinding speed, he latched onto my leg and twisted. I fired but missed, blasting a small crater in the mud as he threw me against the far wall.
Shit.
I was right again; experience was a bitch.
I lunged out of the way of the man’s foot as it crumbled the metal siding I’d been hugging moments before. I scrambled to my feet, putting some distance between us. Things had gone sideways and only one of us was walking out of this alley alive. He stepped between me and the rifle laying in the muck, feet away. So close, yet I’d be dead before I reached it..
“Ideas?” I asked.
Things were getting messy, and I needed an edge.
“Get a normal job; paid assassin isn’t in your wheelhouse,” she replied.
“Not helpful.”
I assessed the damage. The slugs had made a hell of a mess, but androids were built to take a beating. The guy’s chest was wrecked. Metal coils of muscle flexed, and multicolored fluids stained the front of his uniform. His head made a weird jerking motion. Those would have been good signs if not for the eyes. They were alert and focused.
“You’ve crippled several of his critical systems. He won’t be able to outrun you, so his only option is to fight,” Em said. “The coding on his system is tight. I can’t root around to see what weapons he has equipped.”
The android held out his hands, and thin blades extended from each palm.
“I’m going to say the pointy kind,” I said.
His forward lunge was impossibly fast, and it took a moment to realize that he’d buried both blades in my gut.
“Christ,” I grunted through gritted teeth.
I involuntarily cough, freckling his face with bloody droplets. I forced my eyes to focus, even as my vision tunneled in and out. I wrapped my metal arm around him, holding him close. He tried to pull away, but I’m stronger than he expected. With him distracted, I drove the pick concealed in my right hand through the bastard’s temple.
His mouth gaped in surprise.
I stood, holding our awkward embrace while the data pick jammed into his cybernetic brain made a virtual copy and erased his operating system. Em spent that time patching my sorry ass up.
“Jon, I need you to pull out the blades,” she said.
Her voice was tense. She hated this part as much as I did.
Taking a deep breath, I pushed the man away and felt the blades slide free. The gush of blood stopped almost immediately as Em flooded the wounds with coagulant. I dropped to my knees and added my stomach contents to the alley muck. The pain dulled to a throbbing pressure, meaning Em had isolated and blocked the nerves.
“Dammit, Jon, you’ll get us killed one of these days,” she scolded, her voice heavy with worry.
“I didn’t get shot,” I reminded her. “Besides, it’ll take more than this guy to punch our ticket.”
Em was in my head, but I could hide things from her when I wanted to. It would do her no good to know that the wounds terrified me. Not because of the pain, but for what her repairs meant for me. Instead, I pushed feelings of reassurance.
“See?” I said, holding the wall for support as I stood. “All good.”
I looked at my ruined clothes.
“Shit, there’s no mending that,” I grumbled.
“You really should invest in body armor,” she said.
I just grunted in reply. She knew as well as I did that even the crap stuff was pricey. Anything decent was so far out of my price range as to be laughable.
I looked at the android’s body lying in the mud and asked Em to place a call. Within the hour, it would be dismantled and its parts sold on underground market streams. I’d get a small percentage for tipping off my contact. One of many income generators that allowed me to keep my head above water. God bless small business.
They’d offered me a thousand credits to put down the rogue android and recover the data it’d been smuggling out. Corporate espionage gigs paid well, and it was a good score… more than I normally made in a month. This would let me get caught up. I promised myself that I’d be smart with the money this time.
I still had a while before making the drop. Enough time to swing by my ship, grab a shower and a change of clothes. With an hour to spare, I walked through the front door of The Underside. It was one of a dozen seedy dives on the less favored side of the dome. Like the others, it was dark, in disrepair, and likely broke every health code known in the OC.
The thing that differentiated The Underside from every other shitty bar in South Dome was that it was where the dangerous, powerful, or feared drank. Like jetsam, the sea of the station’s indifference cast them upon the bar’s, if not friendly, at least accepting shores. Em often compared it to the Great Atlantic Garbage Patch, in that everything discarded by the inner worlds eventually ended up there. It was a fraternity for the strange, and I liked the place so much I paid rent on a private booth in the back.
I nodded to the Baroness, who sat at the bar drinking a smoking cocktail from a telmop shell. She wore a three-button merlot suit with tails that reached the floor. A matching pillbox hat with a veil complimented it. The outfit is archaic by Gorman standards, something you’d find in a museum, but it suited her.
We’d formally met a few years back when I received a message offering a hundred credits to show up at a designated spot at the docks at exactly one in the morning. When I got there, I found the Baroness lying in a pool of blood after a botched robbery had escalated into a shooting. I stabilized her condition and waited with her until the medical drones arrived. The thing was, I got the message hours before the robbery happened. I did some digging, and the communication had been sitting in the Central databanks for centuries, waiting to be delivered on that specific day and time.
When I quizzed her about it, she explained that hundreds of years earlier she’d belonged to an organization of Gorman scientists that developed a machine capable of transmitting messages into the past. They coded it specifically to the Baroness’ genome and put her into deep stasis. The plan was for her to wake far in the future and send back key information that would allow the group to alter the past, creating a future to their benefit. She awoke in our present time, inheriting a small fortune and a realization that she actually liked the existing timeline.
“If that’s true,” I’d asked, “Then why aren’t we living in some dystopian reality ruled by your nefarious shadow organization?”
She’d only cocked an eyebrow at me.
“Shit… are we living in a dystopian society?” I yelped.
It would certainly explain a few things.
“Nah, they can go take a piss as far as I’m concerned. I’ve got it pretty good right now and life is hard enough without a bunch of assholes trying to rig the game from half a millennia back. I send them just enough to keep them interested and provide the occasional bit of help when needed.”
Like ensuring that I showed up to help after a robbery gone wrong.
The Baroness tilted her drink in my direction, then went back to an animated discussion with the four-foot-tall praying mantis seated beside her.
I held up two fingers to signal Jackson that I wanted the usual. He nodded back and entered the order on the bar console. I don’t know his species, but Jackson looked like an oversized walrus, with four short, hooked arms growing out of his chest. He wore a harness that kept his two side flippers secured to his side and rested in a float chair on a thick, stubby tail.
He looked like Jim Henson’s nightmare, but he was one of the few people in the dome I considered a friend. It didn’t hurt that he owned the bar.
I slid into my booth and Rita came by a few minutes later, setting two tumblers of whiskey on the table. She was tall and a little too thin, with a mop of curly brown hair tied back in a ponytail. She had a half smile that never fully reached her eyes. Here was a woman who had seen hard times and come out the other end. Maybe not smarter, but certainly a lot tougher.
“Carver,” she acknowledged.
“Hey Rita,” I smiled up at her. “Busy later?”
She looked me over. I stand about six foot, two hundred pounds. Gray streaked my black hair and beard. My face was broad and square and looked like someone who’d lost more than a few fights. I carried a few extra pounds but wore it well.
My metal arm and silver eyes marked me as a mod. The enhanced aren’t viewed with affection on the station. There’d been an uprising a few years back, and mods on both sides had been responsible for most of the bloodshed. Still, it wasn’t an issue here in the bar. Word on the street is I’m a dangerous man and Rita liked her men dangerous.
“She must also like them dumb,” Em said, sensing my thoughts. “I’m sure the money has nothing to do with it.”
Rita and I had an arrangement. One Em didn’t approve of.
“I’m off in three hours. Your place?” Rita asked.
“That works.”
“Do I need to bring anything?” she asked, hinting at the fact that my pantry rarely contained more than a few bottles of cheap booze and instant meals. To be fair, I used my ship as a crash pad to grab a few hours’ sleep and a change of clothes. Most of the time I lived off the land, surviving on cheap street food and alcohol.
“Ask her to pick up some fruit and veg,” Em said, attempting to sneak some nutrition into my diet.
“Not happening,” I told my partner.
Rita took my delayed response as indecision.
“I’ll bring over dinner. You eat like a street urchin,” she said.
Not for the first time, I wondered if Em could talk to someone other than me or if all women just thought alike.
“She’s growing on me,” Em replied.
I shook my head, admiring the view as Rita walked back to the bar to grab the next order. I worked my way through the first tumbler, enjoying the burn of alcohol as it warmed my chest. I spent the wait reflecting on how I could’ve done this job without getting a blade in the gut. I’d just finished the first glass when my payday walked through the door.
I gestured to the open seat. The man sat down across from me, glancing at the second glass sitting on the table. He seemed relieved when I picked it up and took a swallow. Fucker probably spends more on a single bottle of wine than I spend on booze in a month.
He wore a heavy coat over an expensive suit. The collar was pulled up to hide his face. I suppose he was trying to be discreet, but he’d have to be on fire for anyone in the bar to give a shit.
“Do you have the data?” he asked.
I didn’t know his name, which is how this sort of business worked. I decided to call him Richie.
I set the data pick on the table, the sensor at the end casting a low green light that reflected off the whiskey glasses. He smiled and reached for it. The smile faltered when he realized the barrel of my pistol was resting on the table’s edge. He couldn’t help but notice that it pointed in his direction.
“I believe we agreed on a thousand creds,” I prompted.
“Of course.”
He pulled a data pad from an inside coat pocket. It was a high-end model. Damn thing cost more than I’d just made. I admit it made me dislike him just a bit more. He touched the device, verified the transaction, and nodded.
“Done.”
“Em?”
“The funds have been deposited,” she replied.
I slid the pistol back into its holster.
“All yours,” I told him.
Richie grabbed the data pick and scurried from the bar. Another satisfied customer.
Jon Carver is a mod. What that means is that he’s part human and part metal. Luckily, he also has a resourceful Em talking in his head, guiding him, and more importantly, fixing him up when he’s badly damaged and left for dead. When not hanging out in Jackson's bar or his dilapidated ship, he’s a gun for hire. When an alien lady going by the name Covis needs help with finding a missing Empress, she seeks out Carver. Though not all the time does Carver wear a detective hat for a fee: sometimes getting to the bottom of things forces him to get out there and ask questions, as it does when he suspects the Indo family of attempted murder. Other times the job seems easy yet so tasking and much more like daring death, like when he had to protect Clockworks, a being that sought to be protected against himself. Even so, the greatest test in Carver’s adventure and misadventure in outer space is when the ghost of his past comes knocking, bent on taking Em from him.
RJ Roder’s Rise of Metal isn’t hard science fiction in which the language and the events themselves, as well as the characters, are too complex. Instead, it’s an easy and enjoyable fun-to-read space thriller. Carver’s voice and sense of humor grip from the first page. His conversation with Em is casual and speaks to their intimate relationship. Along comes Rita, after which it becomes interesting how she and Em relate; rather, their opinion of each other. While the story’s beginning and part of the middle focuses on Carver’s success, towards the end, it explores his fears and vulnerability, eventually culminating into a satisfying ending.
Overall, Rise of Metal will leave sci-fi fans eager for more of Carver and Em (Emily). The story vividly explores planets inhabited by intriguing people, such as the Gormans and Cellanis. Set far from Earth, it features characters like Carmen, who is unhappy about her daughters getting married and leaving her alone, and Covis, who disapproves of a man paying for sex. There is so much more about these characters that makes them memorable and relatable.