“Nice job, thanks,” he told them. Alik liked working with Marley on the occasions he needed to go off book. Marley ran an efficient team and knew never to ask questions. “Your money will be in the designated accounts by morning.”

“Always a pleasure,” Marley said. His altme instructed the four-by-four, and it started driving toward the hub portal.

Behind them, the line of Black Mariahs was facing a huge metal cylinder, fifty meters long, fifteen high. Alik watched in the mirror as the big circular door at the end slowly swung open. The first Black Mariah’s autodrive carefully maneuvered it inside, followed by the second.

Direct disposal was a part of the Lewis County environmental processing site made possible by modern economics. With energy as the Sol system’s currency, everything was costed in wattdollars; and with abundant super-cheap energy delivered from the solarwells, the value of most services and material was inexpensive.

A hundred years previously, people on Earth carefully recycled the last generation’s garbage, breaking down matter into its component atoms, refining their castoffs and sludge into useful compounds, ready to supply manufacturing and microfacturing industries. But now, with so much raw asteroid matériel streaming in at minimal cost, that energy-intensive processing of recycling old things was no longer financially viable.

Those fiscal conditions meant that obsolete items—for example, the Bureau’s fifteen-year-old Black Mariahs—were simply disposed of in the most economic fashion possible.

Just before the four-by-four carrying Alik went through the hub, the last Black Mariah drove into the giant cylindrical airlock and the door swung shut. The heavy-duty rim seal engaged. Carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide from the big extractor towers flooded in.

After all the nitrogen and oxygen had been expelled from the airlock, the door at the other end of the big metal cylinder opened, exposing the portal behind it, which twinned to Haumea station. The pressurized toxic gases acted like a shotgun cartridge, blasting the Black Mariahs out into trans-Neptune space.

Juloss

JULOSS

YEAR 591 AA

The fifteen boys and five girls that made up the Immerle clan’s current senior year were clumped together in a big old plaza, in the shade of a dilapidated seventy-story skyscraper. They had spent six days exploring the ancient abandoned city as part of their training, investigating and analyzing unfamiliar environments. The trip had been scheduled to end nineteen hours ago.

Their flyer hadn’t arrived. Their personal databuds had been glitchy for the whole expedition and had now dropped out of the planetary network. They were isolated, hundreds of kilometers away from the clan estate. Their supplies were low. They had no weapons. They were completely alone.