It never really got dark in the Trenches. There was no natural light at this hour, of course; the sun had long since set, and light pollution meant the stars had been invisible here for well over a century. But the St. Louis Orbital Logistics Hub’s East Bank Launch Super-Zone, EB-01 for short, never slept… and that meant the Trenches, home to the spillover labor and commerce that surrounded the semi-sovereign corporate territory of the spaceport, never slept either. Omnipresent LEDs kept the catwalks bright by night.
Aidan Woldt took it all in as he stepped out of the currency exchange office, stepping quickly into the shadows beside the building. He took his time with his observation, mostly to make sure no one was taking an undue interest in his departure; hidden in the inside pocket of his ragged jacket was the fruits of ten years’ worth of scraping and saving, more than enough money to be worth killing him over. Ordinarily he would never have carried it all on him at one time… but this was the time, the culmination of it all.
As his cybernetic eyes swept across the manmade landscape, Aidan was also conscious that, if all went well, this was the last time he would ever see it. He let his artificial gaze track over the top decks, with their catwalk markets and food stalls. This was the center of grey zone commerce, where scavenged goods from the plastic deserts were bartered for corp-made equipment that “fell off” the big freight trains and river barges. The food was mostly cheap soy smuggled out of agri-automation farms.
The good stalls got creative with shaping and flavoring it, at least.
Aidan’s gaze flicked down to the bottom of the Trenches, where you could still see what this had all been back at the start - reinforced canals and drainage culverts, shot through with freight lines and barge docks, less than half of them still in use. Rapid climate change had made the mighty Mississippi volatile, prone to unpredictable flooding, and these channels had been dug into her banks to control the raging flow. Now people lived in cheap tenements along their sides, and drowned when the flood alarms failed.
Aidan’s destination lay between top and bottom - the middle levels where the cyberware fitters, pawn clinics, and contract brokers had their offices. It was high enough to generally stay dry, and low enough that what went on there flew under the radar of state police when they made their rare sweeps through the Trenches. Satisfied that no one was positioned to intercept him, Aidan emerged from the alley. He walked quickly, but didn’t run, moving like he had a shift to get to and not a small fortune in his pocket.
The catwalks were, as always, an eternal blur of motion. Cargo trams hurdled by right underneath the walkways, the wind of their passage ruffling clothes and scattering discarded pamphlets. Drones buzzed overhead, some carrying small-scale deliveries, others broadcasting holographic advertisements. Ragged, dirty trench kids, hollow cheeked and painfully skinny, ran along railings and climbed girders. Some were probably on courier errands. Others were pickpockets making off with some meager haul.
A small hand scrabbled at Aidan’s outer jacket pocket.
He let it grab the algae bar there. It distracted from the real haul inside his coat.
It was loud here, too, always loud. Trams screeched along their tracks. Foghorns rolled out across the brackish river. Generators hummed with vibrations Aidan could feel in his teeth. Advert drones blared out promotional jingles over the buzz of the rotors that kept them aloft. Storekeepers bellowed from beneath their scavenged roofs of corrugated metal, hawking the less official wares that the locals could more realistically afford. Street preachers shouted their sermons, and unionists belted out their slogans.
The air smelled of river mud, solder smoke, and fried oil. Aidan breathed it in, fixing it in his memory… then broke off in a coughing fit so severe it doubled him over. He staggered to one of the pylons anchoring the catwalk and leaned on it, hacking and wheezing. When it passed, and his chest no longer felt like it was full of razors, he pulled back the hand he’d clapped over his mouth. It came away bloody. “Fuck me,” he muttered, all his premature nostalgia for the Trenches evaporating in an instant.
Ten years in the Unprotected Districts, and the industrial wilderness beyond them, had taken their toll on him. The lungs he’d been born with, raised on the pure, filtered air of Chicago’s climate-controlled Arcology, had suffered outside it. They’d breathed in microplastics in the Detroit reclamation zones and engine fumes in Cleveland’s terminal ports and acid mists that blew in with every pollution-laced rainstorms. Aidan had never smoked, but you wouldn’t guess it from a scan of his soot-clogged cilia.
He needed a new pair of lungs, and a place to live that wouldn’t rot them.
The air up on Celeste 7 might be recycled, but it couldn’t be worse-quality than here.
That hope, the promise of a place that wasn’t choked with smog and wracked by storms, where the ground wasn’t poisoned and the coasts weren’t drowning… that was what had kept Aidan going through all the shit and misery of the past decade. He didn’t expect a place where the streets were paved with gold and everything was easy; he knew how the world worked for people like him, the 99.999% without billions to their names. But a place that was growing instead of dying, one where there was real opportunity…
That was a place worth making sacrifices to reach.
And he wasn’t about to stumble right at the finish line. He pushed away from the pylon, scanning the crowd again to make sure no one was lining him up as an easy mark. Then he dragged in a deep - if rattling - breath and forced his feet to move. They took him through the crowd, over the uneven metal catwalks that bobbed up and down as the river moved, and finally to the stairway, little more than a wide scaffolding, that led down to the middle levels. He was almost to Stitch’s place… and Stitch would set him up.
