Dark Tempest. Manda Benson

      Wolff settled back on the seating, raising his leg and resting his ankle on his knee. This put Jed on her guard again—Wolff relaxed was somehow more threatening than Wolff parading about the ship with a gun. At least she knew where she stood with the latter version.

      “I was born on an asteroid. I don’t remember much about it, now. My mother died shortly after giving birth to me, and it was my grandfather who raised me. He didn’t like me—I don’t mean he was abusive, or anything like that, but there was always this coldness between us. I never knew who my father was—they didn’t speak about it—he must’ve been an outsider.” Wolff hesitated and looked at Jed. “Probably he was of the Blood. In retrospect, I suppose he must’ve raped or deserted her, and that with the circumstances of her death were probably the cause of my grandad’s umbrage.

      “My family were miners. I think they’d been in the asteroid for a couple of centuries at least. Apart from me and Grandad, there were the two offspring of Grandad’s deceased sister and their mates, and three children between them. All the time I can remember being there, I used to steal things and pick on the other kids. I don’t know why. Perhaps because that was all Grandad expected from me. Perhaps I was just a horrible little boy and it was in my nature.

      “When I was twelve years old I managed to sneak onboard the ship that ran around the asteroids picking up the ore and doling out the pay, and it left without my absence being noticed. They must’ve visited dozens of asteroids by the time they found me. I couldn’t identify my asteroid, and I didn’t know its number. That was how I joined the ship.”

      “In what capacity?”

      “Well, it was a barge that hauled ores from the mining communities on the asteroids to the refinery in orbit around a ringed Jovian world. In exchange for letting me live on his ship, the captain expected me to help out with the work.” Wolff exhaled, and cast about the bridge in a self-deprecating way. “Those people on that ship showed me nothing but kindness, and I threw it all back in their faces. They were all tall, mild-mannered people, not like the squashed-faced, stout breed of men in the asteroid belt whose only means of argument or defense is violence, and soon enough I realised I could do what the hell I liked and get away with it, and I was back to vandalising and stealing.

      “The captain kept his patience for nearly a year before he accepted I was incorrigible. He dropped me at the system’s penal center. He said he hoped it would be for my own good as well as his. Now I know enough about the judicial system to know he must have bribed my custodians. Those guards have no scruples. They’ll bail kids to paedophiles and slave drivers and all sorts.”

      Jed interrupted him. “What do you mean, bail?”

      Wolff wiped his mouth on his forearm. Was this the reason his shirt had no sleeves? “I don’t know what you know about the judicial system.”

      “Archer clans are not governed by common law.”

      “I thought not. If you commit a crime,” Wolff said, grinning, “in the real universe, and someone reports it, you can be arrested. If it’s a non-violent crime, a random jury decides whether you are innocent or guilty, and if it’s guilty, they freeze your assets and set your bail. Rich people, or people with lots of friends, can sometimes afford to pay their own bail, but most people can’t. In that case, you’re put up for bail auction, and any member of the public may choose to pay your bail, at which point you are taken into their custody and become their slave for a duration proportional to the bail price. In my case, my bail was paid by a salvage station.”

      Jed fidgeted, uncrossing and re-crossing her legs. “What about if one committed a violent crime and was found guilty of it? You did say the perpetrators of non-violent crimes were bailed.”

      “They’re executed. No one would bail them. In certain mitigating circumstances, they can be castrated and then bailed.”

      “So these individuals are sold to anyone, and whichever man takes possession of them can do whatever he or she wills?”

      “Within reason. It’s illegal to kill or cause permanent injury to a bail slave in your keeping. It’s not,” Wolff said, meeting Jed’s gaze in way that made her uncomfortable, “illegal to rape a slave, unless you do it in such a way as to permanently injure them.”

      “What if the slave revolted or escaped? Or what if, after the bail period was up, the payer of the bail would not release the slave?”

      “Revolting was a thought I often had.” Wolff grinned abruptly. “Or my thoughts were often revolting, whichever you prefer. You see, the kind of people who need slave labour have money and property, and they pay people to enforce their security. Slaves don’t have possessions. They get locked up when they’re not working. There’s nowhere to escape to on a salvage station, at any rate. In space, you’re stuck in whatever little atmosphere-containing crate you end up in. What are you to do if you escape? Hide in an airlock and be hungry for half a day until someone finds you? There’s no point.

      “As for getting out at the end, I’ll explain. When your bail’s set, the custodians anaesthetise you and put a tiny chip under your skin. You don’t know where, so you can’t dig it out. When your bail is paid, they program the chip with information about your owner. A clock on it ticks down until your sentence is over, and then the chip broadcasts a freeman signal. Holding an expired slave is an offence and it means the slave’s bail-payer can be arrested.

      “After that, the bail-payer returns you to the penal center, and they deactivate the chip so it no longer broadcasts the freeman signal.

      “There must’ve been over a hundred bail slaves in total on the salvage station. Our jobs were varied, but never very interesting. I don’t think the foreman was too pleased that I was so young, and not built like the asteroid-mining family I’d come from. It was my first job to pick up the bits that fell off the conveyer belt and put them back into the rending machine, hopefully without it chewing off any of my appendages.”

      “You said bail slaves were not allowed to be mutilated?”

      Wolff shrugged. “If you mutilate yourself working with machinery, it’s your own fault. After I worked on that for a while I did sorting. It was here I first saw chimaera. I wasn’t allowed to handle them in case I damaged them, but they were the only salvaged part that didn’t go on a conveyer belt. I’d been there about a