Robbing Olympus

The price to get her back will be higher than her family can afford—if they had to afford it on their own.

By Bowen Greenwood

Edited by Yuval Kordov

I sprinted forward, breath coming in ragged gasps, StaSec muscle hard on my heels. I vaulted over a stack of crates, but miscalculated the distance. My foot caught on the edge, and I pitched forward, tumbling onto the cold aluminum alloy of the floor. I scrambled to get back up, but it was too late. Mr. StaSec aimed his stopgun right at my face.

The entire point of a stopgun is to keep projectiles from moving too fast so you don’t blow a hole into space. But at two feet away and aimed at my eye, it was going to do more than enough damage. I froze.

“Coriolis force,” StaSec said. “That’s why you tripped over the boxes. Newbies are never ready for it.”

I wasn’t particularly grateful for the explanation, or for his colleague who finally caught up to us. Between the two, though, the chase was over. They dragged me off the deck, cuffed me, and hauled me to their office.

***

Olympus One was the first permanent human habitation in high earth orbit. Scientists performed all kinds of experiments there. Superconductor manufacturing was a lot easier onboard. Still, a giant chunk of the income that funded the place was billionaire tourism.

Which made the name all the more offensive, of course.

Ever since the Apollo astronauts described the view of our planet from space, everyone else has wanted to see it. Ever since Yuri Gregarin orbited Earth, ordinary people have longed to experience zero gravity. And this is humanity we’re talking about, so of course we found less noble uses for zero-g.

It was still a very expensive business to get into space, though. Only the very wealthy could afford it. Alongside its more serious business, Olympus One made a profit separating them from their money.

Station Security, or StaSec for short, had one simple job: make sure the bluebloods who could afford a stay aboard Olympus One felt unquestionably safe while there. To accomplish that, they had all the usual physical conditioning you might expect of law enforcement officers, but all of it was conducted in inergrav–inertial gravity. That’s how they were better prepared for the coriolis force than I was.

Inergrav is the only practicable form of artificial gravity. Most kids learn the most famous explanation for centrifugal force: if you fill a bucket with water, tie it on the end of a rope, and then spin around in circles swinging the bucket, the water won’t spill out. The spinning creates a centrifugal force that keeps the water in place at the bottom of the bucket.

There’s all kinds of technical footnotes to that explanation, but the short version is that Olympus One, like a bicycle wheel nearly a kilometer wide, rotated around its axis at a rate of one revolution per minute. That way, the outer wall of the rim functioned as a “floor,” and the wealthy tourists who could afford to vacation there lived in “gravity” no different than they were accustomed to on Earth. The “spokes” of the wheel—not nearly as many as an actual bike—were mostly elevators and service shafts leading from the outer wheel to the inner axis.

Of course, the real attraction of visiting Olympus was the zero gravity rooms in the center, but I’m coming to that. The point right now is that the rotation creates not just artificial gravity, but also a force pushing one off course the closer you get to the axis of rotation. Vaulting over the crates had changed my distance from the axis enough to make the coriolis force stronger than I’d expected.

Which is why I fell on my face.

The StaSec guard dogs had me locked up in an interrogation cell, shining a bright light in my eyes just like the movies. Bare walls, windowless, furnished with only folding chairs and a table—the place was as cheap as anything on a space station could be.

“Name: Aaron Carmichael. Married, wife not accompanying you on the trip. Occupation: prompt engineer for DreamWilde Entertainment. Doesn’t pay enough to afford a trip to Olympus, but the background check says you won a poker tournament last fall, and that’s how you got the money to come here.” The guard chuckled. “Not a very good husband to do it without your wife, but then, half the men who come here want some time away from their wives.”

His partner rolled his eyes.

Every word of what he’d said about me was false, but no way was I telling them that. We’d spent a lot of money to make that legend stick. I simply held my tongue.

My real name was Trent Kober. I used to be a correctional officer—prison guard, to you—before my divorce. If the tech guys had done their job, though, all my identifying data ought to be in the Olympus One database under the name Aaron Carmichael.

Annoyed by my silence, the StaSec guy who’d collared me said, “This isn’t Earth, and it isn’t America. You don’t get a phone call and a lawyer here.”

It didn’t even work like that anymore in the forty-seven states that were left of America. The Cartel had nibbled off three whole states and parts of two more. Their operatives were so violent that a lot of due process had gone out the window. I ought to know, since I used to be in charge of keeping those animals in cages.

“You signed the contract of carriage before they ever let you on the rocket up here, and that says we can drop you back down whenever we want. Start talking or start falling, punk.”

I’d heard that kind of talk before. I used to dish it out myself. It wasn’t enough to scare me off my cover story.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” I replied. “Yes, my wife and I have been on a rough patch for a while now, which is why I didn’t bring her with me. I didn’t know having your marriage fall apart was a crime up here. You guys host zero-gravity gladiator deathmatches here, how can you get upset over a bad marriage?”

“That’s not why you’re in handcuffs, Carmichael. You’re here because you look suspicious. Period. We can’t find a record of you paying taxes on the winnings from that poker tournament. How is the IRS still letting you walk free? Guys who get away with not paying taxes look suspicious.”

“What do you care? Like you said, this isn’t Earth or America. So I don’t like taxes much. None of you stationheads pay them either.”

“We care because it makes you suspicious. And the kind of clientele Olympus caters to don’t like having suspicious characters around. So make me trust you, Carmichael, or you’re on the next freight dump back to Earth.”

A lot of manufacturing processes were cheaper and easier in high earth orbit. Once manufactured, most of the cargo was simply dropped in a heat-shielded container to land in the Pacific Ocean, where it could be retrieved with helicopters and ships. The things were said to be survivable for humans.

I was counting on it.

“Look, call my wife, okay? She’ll confirm the whole thing.”

“We already did, Carmichael. And yeah, she’s not happy about being left behind so you can watch a couple cartel losers duke it out. Not good enough.”

The real Aaron Carmichael was, presumably, going about his life on Earth, creating prompts that could get good VR footage out of the AI, so DreamWilde could post them online and monetize the clicks. The business of just telling people what they want to hear has become incredibly easier since guys like Carmichael could do it by writing a few lines of text. It used to be a lot harder to make cat videos. Thanks to the income from that, he and his wife, as far as I had been told, were quite prosperous and happily married.

Aaron had only one problem: he looked like me.

The great thing about Olympus’s HEO altitude was that bandwidth was limited. They were far beyond the range of the low earth orbit constellations, so pumping data back and forth required a special signal. Meaning they tended to store data locally, on the station.

Our hackers had gotten into their servers, and substituted my thumbprint, retinal scan, and most importantly my personal tech signature. The innocent Aaron Carmichael had had his identity borrowed for a little while. The church people who’d hired us probably wouldn’t approve of identity theft, but if they wanted results they were going to have to deal with our methods.

The Latter Day Saints aren’t my cup of tea. My parents took me to church on Christmas and Easter. I was baptized when I was a kid, or so they told me. But that’s no reason to go overboard. If you want to get by in this world, you have to do stuff you’re not proud of, and as far as I could tell, the clients didn’t approve of stuff you couldn’t be proud of.

Not a wise view, when the cartels own half your state. Idealists don’t get rich.

StaSec didn’t care about any of that. They just cared that I looked suspicious.

Good.

“Sorry, Carmichael, not sorry. You gambled and you lost. You’re heading back down in a freight pod.”

***

The pod launcher was on the outer hull, in a brightly lit cargo bay cluttered with crates of superconductors and other fruits of the labors performed on Olympus One—the legitimate labors. The StaSec guys dragged me there, stopgun pressed right to the back of my head so I couldn’t mistake the threat.

The weapons had been designed specifically to address the needs of security on a space station. An ordinary firearm was simply unacceptable in space, on account of hull penetration and catastrophic depressurization.

Stopguns, though, were as much of a computer as a gun. Accelerometers tracked which direction it was pointing. Triangulation among network nodes meant it always knew its precise location. So when one pulled the trigger, the stopgun always knew exactly how far its projectile could fly before coming into contact with the hull.

The name “stopgun” came from the fact that its bullets stopped before they could punch a hole through the hull. They deployed tiny little drag brakes to slow their velocity and make sure they simply fell out of the air before they hit the wall. A blunt nose mitigated miscalcs. But up close, they could be just as deadly as a .44 Magnum.

The guards busied themselves programming the pod to accept my tech signature. When you took into account a person’s entire collection of wearable devices—smart contacts, earbeads, nose studs, tongue studs, lip studs, etc.—the combination of network addresses and device IDs became as unique to each individual as a fingerprint. Freight pods are designed to prevent stowaways, but once they put that tech signature in, the doors opened just for me.

“Pod’s dropping in half an hour, Carmichael. You can cool your jets in there ‘til then. Talk to your lawyer when you get down to Earth, maybe he can get you your ticket price back. Maybe.”

They uncuffed me just before they put me in. In the ancient parlance of airline stewardesses, items had a tendency to shift during flight. I guess they didn’t want me getting pummeled by any loose cargo.

Nice of them.

The moment my hands were free, I jerked my wrist from my side up toward my chest. Arm muscles are always far stronger than finger and thumb muscles, and my flex broke the grip of the guard holding my right hand. With my newly free arm, I backfisted one guard right in the nose and was rewarded with a warm spray of blood.

The second guard immediately stepped away. I saw his stopgun coming up, but as he leveled it at my face, I hit the deck. The hull, in other words. The outer wall.

His stopgun refused to fire.

From my prone position, I swung my leg around and delivered a heel right to the kneecap. He howled in pain and collapsed down to the deck alongside me. He was too busy clutching at his damaged joint to keep control of his gun, so I grabbed it, bounced up to my feet, and kicked him again, this time in the temple.

Out of the fight.

His partner wasn’t. A waterfall of blood ran from his nose down over his lips and chin, but he could still see well enough to bring his stopgun to bear, and now I was no longer too close to the hull for the weapon to fire.

On the other hand, I had a stopgun too, now. I aimed it at the second guard and pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

Bloody things were too computerized. It might not have known who was holding it, but it knew I wasn’t the authorized person. It refused to fire.

So I threw it at him.

The coriolis force got me again. The weapon-turned-projectile arced off the path on which I’d thrown it, and sailed past my adversary’s ear.

I cursed and threw myself at him instead, careful to compensate this time. We tumbled to the deck, a tangle of fists and punches. He landed first on his back, and managed to get his knees pulled up to his chest and his feet under me. He kicked hard with both feet, and I flew up off him. The effect was a little stronger than it would have been on Earth, because every little bit of distance between me and the outer hull meant a little less inergrav to hold me down.

He fired. Once again I dove for the deck and prayed for the stopgun to do its job. It did—slowing right down at the end—but it still hurt like blazes, like being shot with a real gun while wearing a ballistic vest. I’d have a bruise on my back where it hit me, but that was a small price to pay.

I got my legs under me and launched, tackling the guard around the midriff. We fell to the deck together. Again, he was the one on his back, which put me at a disadvantage. But this time I moved faster. I drove my fist into his temple like a hammer. He got half a curse out before his lights turned off.

Panting from the exertion, I just laid there for a second, my hand finding the sore spot on my back—right at the kidney. I’d have to get it looked at if I got back down to Earth. But first, I had a job to do, and there was a clock running.

Number one: unconsciousness never lasts as long as it does in the movies. Those two guards were going to be back in action all too soon.

Number two: the guards had told me the freight pod was going to leave in half an hour, and that was maybe a minute or two ago. It was hard to tell because fights always seemed to last forever, even though they were usually over in a matter of seconds. It’s the closest an average person will ever come to a relativistic experience of time.

In any case, I had less than thirty minutes to get to the coliseum and do what the nice little churchgoers on Earth had paid me to do.

First, I stripped off one of the guards’ uniform jackets, hoping the patches and badges would help me get past all the AI surveillance.

Then, I struggled to my feet, still aching from where I’d been shot, shoved my arms through the sleeves, and lumbered out of the cargo bay. I was looking a little disheveled—someone’s blood was on me, my clothes were ripped, and I was moving awkwardly from the giant spreading bruise on my back. The richie riches in the observation lounge all gave me funny looks. I ignored them, though, heading for the elevator.

It was quite a ride. The farther I rode it up, the less “up” meant anything at all. That’s the thing with artificial gravity: the closer you get to the axis of rotation, the less gravity there is, until it disappears altogether. All the tourists wanted to experience it, and the gladiators had no choice but to live it day in and out.

Getting off the elevator at the core was a new experience for me, just like any other first-time visitor. My team had trained me as best they could, though. I knew where to find the handholds—set in the bulkhead and looking almost like ladders—and pulled myself toward my destination.

Hungry, bloodthirsty roars filled the air. The station’s cold metal walls failed utterly to deaden the sound, or the fear that came with it.

The main entryway glowed crimson and blared a pulsing, primal music from inside. Floating scalpers hawked tickets to those who hadn’t come prepared. From inside I could hear the announcer.

“Up next, we give you Renna Davo! In what’s left of Utah, she was a network science major at Brigham Young University. But she went on Spring break to Cancun and bought extabliss from the wrong dealer. We all know how Nova ‘Loa feels about getting a buzz from the competition!”

The crowd roared. I ignored it, cruising past the mad rush of ticket buyers at the official entryway, looking as nonchalant as I could with dried blood on my clothes.

No one here had any right to be offended at the sight of blood.

It’s a lesson humans have been relearning for thousands of years, every time an empire crests its wave and begins the downslope. The more entertainment people buy, the more desensitized they become. They keep paying for stronger and stronger kinds of entertainment.

Maybe the people who hired me were right. Maybe we did lose something as a species when we forgot the idea of a higher power who might hold us to account. All I knew for sure was, at least the “entertainment” offered by Aaron Carmichael and DreameWilde were purely creations of an AI’s imagination. Up here on Olympus, they sold the real thing, and it got worse with every passing year.

Until billionaires were buying tickets to watch people fight for their lives in zero gravity.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. Two thousand and some odd years ago, saints went to the coliseum for their beliefs. Today they were paying a guy without much belief to pull a Latter Day Saint out of a modern coliseum.

We all know how things used to be in America—how they still are, if you believe what’s left of Washington. You break the law, you get a phone call and a lawyer and you’re out the next day after paying a fine. Most of that is a legend from the 20th century, but it doesn’t really matter.

Cartel territory is not America.

Nova ‘Loa, Sangra, Eclipse—it didn’t matter which cartel you crossed. Break one of their so-called laws, and there were no prisons. No phone calls. No lawyers. There were, however, billionaires willing to buy the humans the cartels kidnapped.

Behind me, fading as I got further away, I could still hear the announcer. “The lovely young Miss Davo will be facing …”

An experienced showman, the announcer milked the pregnant pause for all it was worth until the crowd roared, no doubt in response to some over-the-top VR imagery of her opponent. He had to shout to be heard over the excitement.

“A polar bear! Nearly extinct, this brutal specimen was captured in what used to be Canada, and who knows what the radiation has done to it? The beast hasn’t eaten in ten days!”

Grimly, I hurried on until I came to the service entrance. Normally, this would be off limits to your garden variety tourist, but it popped open for the chips embedded in my liberated StaSec jacket.

Hauling myself along by the rungs built into the dingy aluminum walls, I made my way to the eighth door. Lighting was scarce here—locating the next rung and the door handle relied more on touch than sight—but a bright glow emanated from the end of the hallway. There, a barred, spiked portcullis led to the zero-g coliseum. The roar of the bloodthirsty crowd sounded terrifyingly close.

Once again, the stolen jacket came in handy. Door number eight opened for it, and the woman waiting within took my breath away. Her long brown hair floated about her like a chaotic halo. Soft lines and a graceful smile composed a face that would turn any man’s head. They had let her keep one piece of jewelry: a small plastic cross around her neck. Fitting, considering who my clients were.

Under that necklace, though, her body was more like a weightlifter than a model. The bear was going to win, but she could have at least put up a fight. It appeared, though, that I was more convinced of that than she was.

“Please!” she pleaded. “I’ll do anything! Don’t make me go! I don’t want to die!”

“Relax, Ma’am. I’m not a guard. I’m here to take you home.”

Her eyes opened wide.

“The folks in your church must really love you, Renna. They spent a truckload of money to hire people who could get you out.”

She blinked. Her mouth dropped open a bit. If we’d been in gravity, maybe it would have dropped all the way to the floor. “Get… get me…”

“Out. As in, back to Earth.”

“This can’t be real.”

“It won’t be if we keep talking. We don’t have a lot of time. If you want to go, we’ve got to move.”

“How? They’ve got all my biometrics. They’ll never let me on a reentry vehicle.”

“I’ve got a freight pod waiting. Programmed to let me in. But it’s going to drop in”—my smart contacts told me the time—“seventeen minutes. Less talk. More get the hell out of here.”

She eyed my jacket. “You work for StaSec.”

“No, I don’t, but I took the jacket from one of them to help me get past the station’s computers. We’ve got tech guys who got me most of the way to you, but unlocking that door needed the uniform. Renna, I’m sorry, but we’re out of time.” I pulled her by the hand out of her cell.

That’s when my friend from StaSec came back into my life. He still had blood all over his face. Somewhere he’d acquired a new stopgun, and aimed it right at my face.

“Who the hell are you, Carmichael?”

I didn’t waste time answering. Instead, I launched myself off the rung outside Renna’s door with all my strength. The stopgun bullet hit my shoulder while I was still in mid-flight. The pain was a bright spike, but in zero gravity tackling just didn’t work the way it should. The guard and I tumbled end over end until we slammed together into the wall. I tried to knee him in the groin but got the angle wrong and hit his upper thigh.

His fist came out of nowhere and hit me in my left eye. I saw stars, tiny little white fireworks erupting as the optical nerves processed the pain. Floating around just made the disorientation worse. I thought that might be the end of the fight.

Then, with my good eye, I saw a boot connect with the guard’s temple. His lights went out again.

Renna hovered there in the hallway, pouring out profanities in the general direction of the guard, leg still extended from the field goal she’d delivered to the only one of her tormentors she could reach.

This time, I wondered if the guard’s unconsciousness might be permanent. One way or another, being knocked out twice in quick succession wasn’t going to do his brain any good.

I squirmed and wiggled my way through a series of awkward gyrations until I could grab one of the rungs on the wall with one hand, and Renna’s wrist with the other.

“Save it,” I said, interrupting her tirade. “We’ve got to get back to the cargo bay!”

We couldn’t go past the main entrance, not with the polar bear’s putative meal in tow, so I headed for a different elevator. Once we got on board and hit the “down” button, the gradual return of gravity made everything easier. Back on the outer hull, Renna and I raced for the cargo bay. By the time we got there, my smart contacts showed two minutes left.

“Inside the pod!” I said, but as we rushed the loading hatch, it didn’t budge. I stopped just short of smashing my nose to a pulp.

“I thought you said it would work!” Renna said.

Cursing under my breath, I stripped off the stolen StaSec jacket and flung it away, restoring my usual tech signature. The hatch popped open like sesame. I hustled Renna into it first.

Just as she stepped in, the doors to the station’s cargo bay flew open, and every last StaSec guard on Olympus barged in like a human tide.

I grabbed a crate of nanosomethings sitting around waiting for a freight pod and heaved it in their general direction. Not as easy as it might have been up at the zero-g coliseum. It crashed back to the deck after a couple feet.

The good news was it blew apart on impact, and the forward momentum carried the detritus in the same general direction as the guards. My old friend the coriolis force helped spread it horizontally, covering more area. Like a smoke screen, thousands of nanosomethings floated between me and the goons.

They didn’t let that stop them. Shouting at me to freeze, they all fired their stopguns at once.

The cloud of whatever saved my life. All the projectiles sensed the hard metal in front of them and deployed their airbrakes. Most of them deflected off some random piece of metal or another. A couple made it through, but by the time they hit me they weren’t moving fast enough to hurt. The whole mess—nanotech, stopgun bullets, and drops of my blood—crashed back to the deck in a clattering cacophony.

I dove through the hatch of the freight pod, tumbling into Renna, who grunted with the impact.

The pod’s hatch slammed shut behind me. A few more stopgun bullets drummed against the pod’s hull, but the thing was built to shield precious cargo from the heat of reentry. The bullets, conversely, were specifically designed not to penetrate a hull. They couldn’t hurt us.

Not in the bare seconds we had left before the clock ran out.

The cargo bay door dropped open and launched us toward Earth.

I never found out what happened to the StaSec muscle when the bay opened to the vacuum. To be honest, I never cared. Renna and I began the journey back to Earth, back to the saints who loved her enough to hire my team.

Hostage rescue didn’t come cheap. To hire us, they’d had to outbid one of the last movie stars. Obviously Renna’s parents would spend everything they had to get her back, but everything one family had wasn’t enough. It had taken a community.

The government didn’t have its head screwed on straight enough to protect its citizens, but the Latter Day Saints, apparently, did. I wondered, as we enjoyed a brief moment of microgravity before the inevitable g-forces, whether there might just be something to their beliefs.

There wasn’t time to think it all the way through.

Reentry was going to hurt. I had been told to expect that, before we splashed down into the Pacific. High G and intense heat, in a structure built for cargo, not humans. I had to trust my colleagues when they assured me it was possible.

I guess I had to have faith.

All that lay in our future, though. The first brush with the atmosphere felt more like a mild bump, and the ride hadn’t yet become unbearable.

“Who are you?” Renna asked.

“Name’s Trent Kober. Your mother’s church took up a collection and hired me to get you out.”

“And that’s … what? Your job?”

“You’re not the only person the cartels have found ‘guilty’ of breaking their so-called laws. There’s a big demand for getting those people back. The feds don’t really have the chops to do it anymore. A few of my friends and I went into business doing work people would pay good money to do. The free market at work. Never operated in space before, but the church paid me more than enough to make learning worthwhile.”

Renna gave me a long, thoughtful look. “You said you had tech guys who helped you get past security?”

“Yeah, some good ones who rejected the system.”

“I’m studying network science at school. Have any openings?”

I couldn’t hold back a smile. “We might at that, kid. We might at that.”

Renna smiled in return—it broke my heart, given what she had been through. “I used to go with my mom on Sundays before I left for school. I remember what they said about doing unto others what you’d want done unto you. I think I just got done unto in a pretty big way. If you want me, I’d like to help.”

---

Bowen Greenwood is an Amazon bestselling author of mysteries, thrillers and science fiction with over 20 novels under his belt, including the Exile War series, a space opera set a couple hundred years further into Earth's future than "Robbing Olympus." Information about his other writing can be found at www.bowengreenwood.com, x.com/bowengreenwood, facebook.com/booksbybowengreenwood, and others.

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