“Huw North,” Adam said as they shook hands. “One of my colleagues was here last week.”

“Not sure if I remember,” Nigel Murphy said.

“He said you were the man to talk to.”

“Depends what you want to talk about… comrade.”

Adam held in a sigh. He’d been through this same ritual so many times over the years. By now he really ought to have worked out how to circumvent the bullshit and get right down to business. But as always, it had to be played out. The local man had to be proved top dog in front of his friends.

“I have a few issues,” Adam said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“You’re very free with your money there, comrade,” said one of the others sitting behind Nigel Murphy. “Got a lot of it, have you? Thinking you can buy our friendship?”

Adam smiled thinly at the barfly. “I don’t want your friendship, and you certainly don’t want to be a friend of mine.”

The man grinned around at his colleagues. His appearance was mid-thirties, and he had the kind of brashness that suggested that was his genuine age, a first-lifer. “Why’s that?”

“Who are you?”

“Sabbah. What’s it to you?”

“Well, Sabbah. If you were my friend, you’d be stalked across the Commonwealth, and when they caught you, you’d die. Permanently.”

Nobody in the bar was smiling anymore. Adam was glad of the small heavy bulge in his jacket produced by the ion pistol.

“Any of you remember November 21, 2344?” Adam looked around challengingly.

“Abadan station,” Nigel Murphy said quietly.

“That was you?” Sabbah asked.

“Let’s just say I was in the region at the time.”

“Four hundred and eighty people killed,” Murphy said. “A third of them total deaths. Children who were too young to have memorycell inserts.”

“The train was late,” Adam said. His throat was dry as he remembered the events. They were still terribly clear. He’d never had a memory edit, never taken the easy way out. Live with the consequences of your actions. So every night he dreamed of the explosion and derailment just in front of the gateway, carriages plunging across junctions and parallel rails in the busiest section of the station. Fifteen trains hit, sideshunted, crashing, bursting apart, exploding, spewing out radioactive elements. And bodies. “It was on the wrong section of track at the wrong time. My chapter was after the Kilburn grain train.”

“You wanted to stop people from eating?” Sabbah asked sneeringly.

“Is this a drinking den or a Socialist chapter? Don’t you know anything about the Party you support? The reason we exist? There are certain types of grain trains which are specially designed to go through zero-end gateways. CST don’t tell people about those trains, same way as they don’t mention zero-end. The company spent millions designing wagons which can function in freefall and a vacuum. Millions of dollars developing machinery whose only job is to dump their contents into space. They go through a zero-end gateway onto a line of track that’s just hanging there in the middle of interstellar space. Nobody knows where. It doesn’t matter, they exist so that we can safely dump anything harmful away from H-congruous planets. So they send the trains with their special wagons through and open the hatches to expel their contents. Except there’s nothing physically dangerous about the grain. It’s just tens of thousands of tons of perfectly good grain streaming out into the void. There’s another clever mechanism built into the wagons to make sure of that. Just opening the hatch isn’t good enough. In freefall the grain will simply sit there, it has to be physically pushed out. And do you know why they do it?”

“The market,” Nigel Murphy said with a hint of weariness.

“Damn right: the market. If there’s ever a glut of food, the prices go down. Commodity traders can’t have that; they can’t sell at enough profit to pay for the gamble they’ve made on the work of others, so the market demands less food to go around. The grain trains roll through the zero-end gateways, and people pay higher prices for basic food. Any society which allows that to happen is fundamentally wrong. And grain is just the tiniest part of the abuse people are subject to thanks to the capitalist market economy.” Adam stared hard at Sabbah, knowing that once again he was going too far, making too much of an issue out of his own commitment. He didn’t care; this was what he’d devoted himself to. Even now, with all his other priorities, the greater human cause still fueled him. “That’s why I joined this Party, to end that kind of monstrous injustice. That’s why I’ve committed my life to this Party. And that’s why I’ll die, a total death, a member of this Party. Because I believe the human race deserves better than those bastard plutocrats running us like some private fiefdom. How about you, sonny? What do you believe in?”

“Thanks for clearing that up,” Nigel Murphy said hurriedly. He stood between Adam and Sabbah. “All of us here are good members of the Party, Huw. We might have joined for different reasons, but we have the same aims.” With one hand he signaled Sabbah and the others to stay at the bar. His other arm pressed lightly on Adam’s shoulder, steering him toward a small door. “Let’s talk.”

The back room was used to store beer crates and all the other junk that a bar generates down the years. A single polyphoto strip was fixed to the ceiling, providing illumination. When the door was closed, Adam’s e-butler informed him its access to the cybersphere had been severed.

“Sorry about that,” Nigel Murphy said as they pulled out a couple of empty beer crates to sit on. “The comrades aren’t used to new faces around here.”

“You mean the Party’s a lost cause on Velaines?”

Nigel Murphy nodded reluctantly. “It seems that way some days. We barely scrape two percent in elections now, and a lot of those are simply protest votes against the major parties. Any direct action we take against the companies is so… I don’t know. Puerile? It’s like we’re hitting a planet with a rubber hammer, we’re not causing any damage. And there’s always the risk of another mistake like Abadan. Socialism isn’t about killing people, after all. It’s supposed to be about justice.”

“I know. It’s hard, believe me. And I’ve been working for the cause a lot longer than you. But you have to believe that someday all this will change. The Commonwealth today is based on pure imperialist expansion. That’s always the most favorable time for market economics because there are always new markets opening. But it will ultimately fail. The expansion into phase three space is nothing like as fast and aggressive as the first and second phases were. The whole process is slowing. Eventually this madness will stop and we can start to focus our resources toward genuine social growth instead of physical.”

“Let’s hope so.” Nigel Murphy raised his beer bottle. “So what can I do for you?”

“I need to speak to some people. I’m looking to buy weapons hardware.”

“Still blowing up grain trains, huh?”

“Yeah.” Adam forced a smile. “Still blowing up grain trains. Can you set that up for me?”

“I can try. I’ve bought a few small pieces myself over the years.”

“I’m not looking for small pieces.”

“The dealer I use, she should be able to help. I’ll ask.”

“Thank you.”

“What kind of hardware are we talking about, exactly?”

Adam handed over a hard copy of the list. “The deal is this; you can add on whatever this chapter needs up to ten percent of the total price. Think of it as a finder’s fee.”

“This is some very serious hardware.”

“I represent a very serious chapter.”

“All right then.” Nigel Murphy still couldn’t quite banish the troubled expression from his face as he read down the list. “Give me your e-butler access code. I’ll call when I’ve set up the meeting.”

“Good. One thing, have you had any new members join recently? The last couple of months or so?”