Excerpt: The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee
A battle-worn corporate samurai undertakes one last mission on a merciless planet where death is always a mere breath away, in this standalone dystopian epic from the author of the modern fantasy classic Jade City.
LIVE BY THE CODE. DIE BY THE KNIFE.
“Fonda Lee is a master of genre-bending adventure, and I couldn’t wait to see where she’d take this mix of high stakes corporate gamesmanship and space colonization. I wasn’t disappointed. The Last Contract of Isako may be her best work yet.”
Read the first three chapters of The Last Contract of Isako, on sale May 5th, below!
ONE
“Fuck Earth.”
the last words of Captain Janus Brady, 44 AF
Monday evening, 4-Week, 500 AF
Two names remain on Isthmus Isako’s list of wagemen to dismiss from the Company.
Only two, thank all the gods of old Earth that Isako doesn’t believe in. She’s sick of handing out notices, of being the bad guy, even though it’s part of her job, the part that people know and hate her for. At this stage in her career, she ought to be settling into some sort of comfortable wise-elder role, one that affords undisputed respect yet pleasant anonymity.
Things didn’t work out that way.
She finds both men drinking in quiet dread together in a dive bar at the north end of Tenacity Cityhab, where none of their former colleagues in Astrocommunications might recognize them. The stench of stale beer and leafsmoke assaults her nostrils as soon as she walks through the doors of the Oxygn Bar. She does a quick, instinctive threat assessment, but there’s no ambush lying in wait. Just a couple dozen wagefolk huddled in small groups over muted conversation and mugs of heated ale. They lift faces bland with disinterest until they catch sight of the triggersheath strapped to her thigh.
Contractor.
Isako doesn’t need to hear the word on their lips to sense the nervous hostility. If these were better times, she’d be met with nods of respect. If she were in an Astrocom neighborhood, if this were a year of peace and expansion, she’d be greeted by name and they’d make room for her at the bar and someone would offer to buy her a drink, angling to get on her good side, maybe have her put in a word for them with the boss.
Now they turn their eyes away. War’s over. They know why she’s here.
Dew Loren and Wolf Wyatt are at a small round table in the back. She recognizes them from the photographs in their personnel files but also because they’re old-timers in the division. Isako pulls a chair over to the table, not too close, and sits down on the edge of it, both feet firm on the floor.
“Would you rather do this here, or go somewhere more private?”
She keeps her voice professional but considerate. Lowered, but firm. What’s happening to them isn’t personal, but they need to understand it’s nonnegotiable.
Loren, the curly-haired older man, raises eyes that’re weary and bloodshot but unsurprised. He shrugs. “Might as well do it here. What does it matter?” He doesn’t bother to keep his voice down. Nearby bar patrons look over at their table in pity, but he ignores them. Loren’s always been like that. Straightforward. Unflinching. Not afraid to point shit out for what it is. Isako likes that about him, always has.
She doesn’t know much about Wolf Wyatt. Thirty-six years old, unmarried, no kids. Short but muscular, lifts weights and takes protein supplements and wears tight shirts to show it. Reputedly the best futsal player in the division, even used to play on the Astrocom Stars, back when they still had a team worth watching. She’s heard he’s a great guy to work with if you get along with him and an asshole if you don’t.
Wyatt’s leaning around the table, the glare he’s fixing on her as fierce as his kith namesake.
Don’t do it, Isako thinks at him. Don’t try. We all knew this was coming. There’s nothing any of us can do about it except keep our dignity.
She can tell when a wageman’s reached a breaking point and is about to do something stupid. It’s a feeling she gets, the way some people who work beyond the airshield say they can feel in their bones the coming of a drystorm.
Isako takes off her hat and gloves and lays them on the table. She doesn’t see steam as she exhales. Springtime, a new year after seven months of winter, finally warm enough for her to feel all her fingers and toes, even in the low-heat-ration areas of the cityhab. She pulls a screen from the inside pocket of her jacket, begins to unfold it on the table.
She brings up Loren’s dismissal notice first. “Dew Loren,” she says, keeping her voice the same, her expression unchanged. “I regret to inform you that your position as senior—”
Wyatt lunges.
He chooses the moment when her hands are busy, her attention on the screen and the other man. Figures she won’t be able to react quickly, not before he gets to her with the shiv he pulls from his sleeve.
Isako’s chair flies backward as she explodes out of it. Muscle memory takes her from a still, seated position directly into dynamic Fourth Stance—Meeting the Storm—back heel planted, weight low and forward, angled away from the path of her attacker. She has plenty of time to get there, relatively speaking—a whole second, with the curve of the table between them.
The heel of her left palm pops the top of the triggersheath forward. Automatic motion, faster than thought. The longknife ejects with lethal silence into her waiting right hand. Forty-five centimeters of high-carbon Aquilon steel slashes down across the inside of Wyatt’s forearm, severing tendons and spasming the makeshift weapon from his fingers, before reversing and driving upward under his rib cage.
She barely has to push; the wageman’s momentum helps her, impales his heart onto the blade. She looks into his face—contorted with fear and pain and oddly trusting relief. His hands come up and paw weakly at her shoulders as she strains against his weight. He’s not as tall as her, has to raise his chin for them to lock eyes.
“Sorry,” he whispers.
He slumps forward into her. Isako lowers him to the ground gently. She pulls the longknife free and wipes it on a square of black microfiber cloth she carries in the inside breast pocket of her red peacoat, then sheathes it without looking, drawing the back of the blade across the mouth of the triggersheath, then sliding it in until it clicks back into place.
Every set of eyes in the bar is drilling hatefully into her back.
A man just tried to skewer her with a sharpened iron spike, but she’s the one they see as a murderer. She’s tempted to turn around and point out what a bunch of fucking hypocrites they are. As if they aren’t glad it was him and not any of them. As if Wyatt didn’t choose suicide by trac, the coward’s way out, putting blood on her hands instead of doing the respectable thing and accepting his fate, which is what it is—no one’s fault.
But she’s been around long enough to know berating these wagefolk won’t change anything. Certainly won’t make them despise her any less. She’s just the messenger, but people have a long tradition of shooting messengers.
She lifts her collar and places a call to Cityhab Services.
The Oxygn Bar starts emptying out. Nothing like a dead man on the floor to ruin the vibe.
Dew Loren has gone pale as a summer sky and sweat has broken out on his brow, but he hasn’t moved from his spot. He looks down at his colleague’s body before sorrowfully finishing off the last of the beer in his mug. “I tried to talk him out of it.”
“I appreciate that.” Isako rights the fallen chair and sits back down zanshin in exactly the same way—on the front of the seat, feet planted, spine straight, enough space between her and the table that it won’t be in her way if she needs to move suddenly. She doesn’t think Loren will try anything, but she’s a longkniveswoman and this is how she always sits in public settings, how she was trained to sit by her kithfather ever since she was a little girl. “I wish he’d listened to you, but it’s not your fault he didn’t.”
“Have a lot of folks been taking it badly?”
“Only a few.” Eleven out of two hundred, including Wyatt. Not so bad. It wasn’t as if anyone was shocked by the dismissals. That’s what happens when a division loses a war and gets taken over. Anyone who can transfer out of Astrocom has done so already. Loren’s like her, though. Been in the same place too long to have anywhere else to go.
He gestures at the screen impatiently. “Get on with it, then.”
Isako reaches back over and pushes it toward him. She starts again, wanting to do it right. “Dew Loren, I regret to inform you that your position as senior communications technician is being eliminated. Be assured this decision was made after careful consideration for the long-term health of Starhome Exploration Group and the future of human settlement on Aquilo. Unfortunately, at this time, the Company does not have another open position that fits your experience and qualifications.”
Loren doesn’t respond. Just stares straight at her while she talks, making her feel like shit.
“In recognition of your many years of hard work and service, the Company is pleased to offer you and your family a voluntary resignation package consisting of three years’ worth of wages, along with additional bonuses based on seniority and division performance, as detailed in the provided agreement. Should you accept the terms, you’ll be granted seventy-eight hours to leave Company premises. If you choose to decline, your employment will conclude, effective immediately, and all prior legal obligations between you and the Company are deemed null and void. On behalf of the Executive and the Board of Directors of Starhome Exploration Group, I commend you on your successful career and your longstanding commitment to our shared vision of a more prosperous and secure future for all of humankind.”
That’s where the speech ends. She’s doled out the formal Companyspeak claptrap so many times she’s sure she knows it better than whoever in Human Resources wrote it.
Maybe it’s the quiet sufferance on Loren’s face; maybe it’s the fact that his daughter and Maya used to go to the same dance class when they were little girls and Isako remembers laughing with him in the theater lobby after the year-end recital about the money they were both wasting; maybe it’s Wolf Wyatt’s body on the floor next to their table. Whatever it is, Isako goes off script.
“I’m sorry, Loren. I really didn’t want to see your name on the list.”
It’s why she left him until the end. She told herself she was giving him the gift of more time, when really, she’s been putting it off, and the days he’s been forced to wait for her arrival have probably been more cruel than kind.
She doesn’t say that part. She’s said more than necessary already.
His stiff mouth sags, like bread deflating. Loren has the soft, creamy complexion of an officer-class wageman who’s spent his life within the airshield and comfortably indoors, undamaged by the planet’s harsh winds or radiation. But his voice is rough as gravel. “You know, I hoped Greves would give me the news himself. After thirty-eight years in the division, you’d think I’d earned that much at least. Hell, I was working for him long before he was a director.” He snorts in self-contempt. “Stupid of me to think he wouldn’t send a fucking contractor, like they all do.”
“It’s my job, Loren.”
He sneers. “I’m sure you’ve been busy.”
“Not for much longer.” A reminder that she might not escape the purge either.
Some of the anger leaves Loren’s expression. He pulls Wyatt’s half-empty mug of beer toward himself. Why not? The other guy’s not finishing it. Isako has the strong urge to order a drink for herself, but she doesn’t think the lone remaining bartender would serve it to her. Or maybe he’d poison it first.
Lore chuckles darkly. “How old are you, Isako?”
“Fifty.” Fifty-three in Terran, but who uses the unflattering homeworld calendar these days.
“I’m sixty-three,” he says dully. Only two years short of Company-sponsored retirement. “I’ve spent my whole career in Astrocommunications. My kithfather did the same. I have ancestors who were Astrocom techs on the Great Ships. I don’t have any skills that other divisions would want and I’m too damn old to learn new ones. What chance would I have as a freelancer? I wouldn’t even last a year.”
Isako doesn’t argue.
“Wyatt didn’t hold anything against you, by the way,” Loren says. “He called you a tough old cookie, said he’d be surprised if he got the jump on you, but he was going to try anyway, because what did we have to lose? Said he’d rather go down fighting, and if he did manage to take you out, well, that’s one less murdering trac out there. That’s the way he saw it.”
Sad, twisted logic on Wyatt’s part. What wagemen seem to conveniently forget is that contractors can be quickly replaced. Wyatt’s dismissal notice wouldn’t go away if she were dead. It would simply be handled by someone else.
“You don’t see it that way,” she reminds Loren gently.
“I’ve got family to think of.” Earlier, he was staring daggers at Isako but now he blinks quickly and looks away. His voice turns thick, as if his throat is closing up. “My baby girl Tessa’s going to have a baby of her own this summer. My first grandkid. How time flies, you know? Seems like yesterday that she was running around in a diaper. You have a daughter, too, don’t you?”
“Yeah. She was in the same dance class as Tessa for a year.”
“Oh yeah, I remember that now.” Loren’s face brightens. “What a long time ago. Tessa didn’t stick with dance for long.”
“Neither did Maya.”
“She took to running instead. Was really good at it, too. Tri-division champion in the four hundred and the eight hundred meters. She says the baby’s kicking so much that it’s another runner for sure.” Loren’s eyes go soft, and he looks as if he’s going to brag some more, perhaps ask Isako about her own daughter, so the two of them can reminisce together, but then he seems to remember where he is, and why they’re here.
He sits back. Blinks slowly to clear away the memories. Closes his mouth like shutting a heavy door.
“Sounds like Tessa grew up to be an incredible young woman,” Isako says.
This is part of the job, too. Sometimes it’s the longknife. Sometimes it’s sitting and listening. Offering the right words to help people accept responsibility. The art of DTE—dismissal, termination, and eviction—is only one aspect of a good contractor’s skillset, but an important one, because unfortunately, it’s what many wagefolk think of first when they think of tracs.
“I want to do the right thing,” Loren says. “I’m not going to become one of those sad sacks on the street, begging or stealing for scrip, using up oxygen and water past my due. I won’t make my kith ashamed of me like that. I want Tessa’s kids to have a nameplace they can visit and be proud of.” He raises his chin and meets Isako’s eyes. “I’ll resign.”
She inclines her head in appreciation. “Thank you for your bequest.”
Loren pulls the screen over, scrolls to the bottom, and hovers his finger over the biosignature box. “I don’t need to read all this, do I? It’s the standard stuff? You’d tell me if it wasn’t, wouldn’t you?”
“It’s all the usual,” she assures him. “Everything will go to Tessa and her family.”
She turns her face aside to give Loren a sliver of privacy as he touches his finger to the screen.
“I guess that’s it, then.” His voice is weighed down with finality, but it’s brisk and steady, almost eager. “When’s everyone else going?”
Isako takes the screen back from him and pockets it. “There’s going to be a group of about a dozen on Freeday at Easthatch. It’s up to you. Some people want to be together. Some would rather go it alone.”
“Are you going to be there?” The touch of plaintiveness surprises her. Not because, beneath the stoic acceptance, he’s afraid. Everyone is. But because he doesn’t hate her. She’s surprised by how much that means to her.
For the first time, she offers Loren a smile. She’s been told she looks younger when she smiles, which is a shame, as she hasn’t had much reason to smile for the past two weeks. She’s smiling not only for Loren’s sake, but because she’s finally done. She can rest for a while. The prospect is delicious.
“I’ll be there,” she promises. It’s the least she can do.
She always did like Dew Loren. Now she respects and envies him. At least he knows. His mind can finally be at ease. All that’s left to do is prepare. She can’t say the same.
Like Loren, she’s too entrenched in Greves’s organization. If her client is moved to another role in the Company, she’ll go with him. If not, she’ll be in Loren’s position soon. Only there won’t be someone sitting down with her to deliver the news. Contractors aren’t given exit packages. All she’ll get is an impersonal notice that her services are no longer required and that her contract has been canceled.
A couple of Cityhab Services workers in official orange parkas come into the Oxygn Bar and begin maneuvering Wolf Wyatt into a body bag. Isako doesn’t feel like sticking around for that. She collects her hat and puts on her gloves; her fingers are cold again. Her knees twinge in stiff protest when she stands.
Loren reaches out and stops short of taking her by the coat sleeve. “I’m glad it was you after all.” His reddened eyes shine up at her through the yellowish, leafsmoke-clogged air. “You’re a contractor, but you’ve still got a heart, Isako. That’s rare, you know?”
Isako has nothing more to say to that. She goes outside and stands on the sidewalk where the dry air hurts her face. She calls her client. “It’s all done. Where are you?”
A moment of silence before Greves says, “I’m at the Observatory.”
TWO
The dome on top of Astrocom headquarters is the oldest observatory on the planet. It’s useless from a practical standpoint, what with the light pollution from the cityhab, the visual distortion of the airshield, and the fact that there are a dozen newer, bigger telescopes in facilities at high elevation points across both of Aquilo’s continents and in orbit. But the Observatory has historical significance. It was built by the Founders with its powerful eye pointed back at Earth’s star, back when people cared about where their ancestors came from.
The working museum still hosts visiting school groups, but right now, it’s cavernously empty except for a lone man in a black duffle coat leaning against the railing that surrounds the antique telescope, staring pensively up at the band of night sky visible through the half-open roof.
“I should’ve been the one to do it.” His voice echoes in the emptiness.
“Absolutely not.” Imagine if Wyatt had tried to kill Greves instead of her. Enough wagefolk react badly to dismissal that every director uses contractors for DTE.
But Greves is not like most other directors. He might’ve actually tried to deliver the notices himself if Isako hadn’t shut the idea down right away. She managed to protect her client through three grueling years of divisional warfare. She’s not about to let him be assassinated by an angry wageman just because he wants to be a man of his people in defeat.
But the impulse is what makes him a leader she wants to work for.
“They’re justified in feeling betrayed. I promised a new era of space exploration for the Company and growth for Astrocom. I couldn’t have failed more spectacularly.”
Isako goes to stand beside him but she doesn’t look up at the starry sky. As far as she’s concerned, there’s no point anymore. “You believed in what you promised, and you made a lot of people in the Company believe it, too. Just because the Executive and the Board decided not to support us doesn’t change any of that. We did our best.”
“We really did.” He straightens away from the railing. Even at his full height, he’s nearly a head shorter than her. They’re a puzzling sight together, a picture of contrasts, and not just physically. Greves is stocky, handsome, and blond, and what he lacks in stature, he makes up for with hyperkinetic presence, showmanship, savvy, and ambitious dreams. Napoleon complex, maybe. It works for him. When he gets going about a big idea, he practically bounces out of his chair and waves his arms in meetings, infects everyone around him with animated energy. At fifty-seven, he’s one of the youngest directors in the Company.
Seven years his junior, Isako is ancient for a contractor.
Greves gives her a wan smile. “We wouldn’t even have had a fighting chance if I didn’t have the best atier on the planet. You’re a pro, Isa. I couldn’t have asked for more.”
She’s not humble enough to deny it.
Because there are contractors, and then there are atier contractors.
Atiers are the best of the best. The elite of the black-badge world. For every hundred general contractors there are ten mid-tier contractors. For every hundred midtracs, there’s one atier.
A good atier can do math in their head, hobnob at a black-tie gala, and kill a man a dozen ways. Strategist, chief of staff, personal bodyguard, diplomatic aide, you name it. Brains and muscle in one package. They’re expensive to hire and licensed in strictly limited number by the Agency that selects and trains them starting at the age of sixteen and straps them up with longknives, blistering business savvy, and fearlessness.
The clients who pay handsomely for their services are hard to please—the wealthiest and most powerful directors and the top subdirectors who would do anything to keep an edge. Atiers are that edge. One atier for one client at a time. Company rules.
When war broke out between Astrocommunications and Satellite Operations, Isako did everything she could to deliver victory to Greves. She advocated for his vision with the Sweetsea, laboring over reports, presentations, and meetings to advance his agenda. She orchestrated attacks that exposed vulnerabilities in SatOps systems and facilities while defending Astrocom from counterattacks. She planted agents and saboteurs within enemy ranks. She terminated three Astrocom techs who were SatOps spies. She engaged people to bribe, blackmail, and slander SatOps leaders while protecting Greves’s inner circle and gathering support and allies from other divisions. She sent her client on tours to raise division morale and inspire the wagefolk. During the three-year conflict, she was nearly killed—twice.
In the end, all for nothing.
“The thing that pisses me off the most,” Greves says bitterly, “is that we were fighting other reunionists. The Executive wanted a consolidation, and we couldn’t get it done peacefully, so we tore each other apart. The terraformists didn’t have to do anything except sit back, watch, and grow stronger. You heard about the Board of Directors nomination?”
“Who hasn’t?” The recent news is all over the Companynet, eclipsing even the outcome of the Astrocom-SatOps war.
“Sandbar Uchi, of course.” Greves spits the name like a profanity. Not that it’s any surprise the dapper, seventy-year-old golden boy of the terraforming movement has been fast-tracked into Company leadership. As the two most vocal rising stars in the ongoing contest of Earth versus earth, Forest Greves and Sandbar Uchi are often spoken of in the same breath.
At least, they used to be.
“The Company really has lost its way and gone over to the little-Es.” Greves’s hands tighten on the railing. “I’m afraid we’re headed for a bleak time, Isa.”
“Political winds change,” Isako points out. “The terraformists have momentum right now, but we can take it back if we play our cards right and make sure you land in a good place.”
“And how’re you imagining that happens, atier?”
“Ask for a position within Satellite Operations as a subdirector. Kiss ass and play meek if you have to. Savannah Minto is old. In another twenty years, she’ll be on her way out and you’ll be in the ideal position to take over her job as director.”
Greves smirks a little. “Beg for a demotion to work under the conqueror.”
“For now. So you can come out on top in the end. If you’re patient.”
“You’d be okay with that? You didn’t sign up to work for a defeated subdirector. Hell, in that position, I probably couldn’t even afford to pay atier rates.”
“Doesn’t matter. An Exclusive is an Exclusive. I go where you go.”
She means it. As far as clients go, Greves is the best she’s had. After they worked together for three years, he offered her a lifelong contract. She asked for twenty-six hours to make her decision. He told her she could take a week.
She went home and slept on it, then accepted the following morning. That was nine years ago. Choosing to bind herself to a single client for the rest of her career wasn’t a hard decision, not at the time. A lot of atiers hope for the coveted Exclusive, but few are lucky enough to receive an offer from a client they actually like and respect as a person, much less someone on a seemingly straight upward trajectory within the Company.
Their once promising journey together turned into a downward spiral. But the Code of Client Service might as well be a marriage vow. To serve is to live. To live is to die. In other words, for better or for worse, in victory or defeat, till death do us part.
She’ll die a lot sooner than he will, and then he’ll need a new atier, but she figures she’s got a few good years left. Before her knees betray her, at least.
Greves takes a final look at the sky before he touches the controls to close the observatory dome. It starts sliding shut slowly, blocking out the stars. “I’ll take your recommendation under consideration.”
“Have you heard anything from the Sweetsea? Any hint of what they might do?”
There’s a chance Greves doesn’t even get demoted, simply dismissed like the two hundred members of Astrocom to whom Isako’s been delivering notices. She doesn’t think it likely—he’s too young, has too much potential, is too well liked, at least by some important people—but it’s possible.
In which case, they’re both fucked.
She would appreciate some advance notice if that’s to be the case.
Greves shakes his head. “I should’ve hired you on and given you a white badge years ago, when I still had the chance. I’m sorry, Isa.”
“Nothing to be sorry for.” Even if the Board hadn’t placed both Astrocom and SatOps under a hiring freeze during the war, she wouldn’t have accepted the offer. Regular wagefolk aren’t permitted to carry weapons, much less do the off-the-record work that contractors are necessary for. “You needed me as an atier,” she reminds him.
“Still do. Must’ve been a monumentally shitty experience to deliver all of those notices to people we’ve known for years, and you didn’t even complain about it.”
What would be the point of complaining? she wonders. Nothing but misplaced energy, like the wagefolk in the Oxygn Bar blaming her for Wyatt’s death. Acting sorry for herself certainly wouldn’t serve her client. She’s been living by the Code all her life. She can’t do anything about the decisions being made above her pay grade, but she’ll stay professional until the end.
“The last ones to resign are doing so on Freeday at Easthatch,” she says. “In case you want to be there to witness.”
Greves winces. “I don’t think I’ll watch this time.”
She can’t blame him. In their twelve years of working together, she’s never seen him more discouraged by failure or more pessimistic about the future. She’d hoped for a more positive reaction to her suggestion that he advocate for a reduced role, one that could allow him to climb back up, eventually. But maybe she’s asking for too much, too early. Give the man time to grieve the destruction of his division and the loss of his dreams.
“Just think about the idea,” she urges him. “Working in SatOps could be an opportunity.”
The last sliver of starlight vanishes above them. “Take the next few days off, Isa,” Greves suggests. “If anyone deserves a break, it’s you.”
THREE
“Though winter reigns above, despair not, for the Mother below promises spring. Those who have passed from this life wait peacefully in her compassionate embrace. Behold, when by our faith she is freed from her chains, they shall live again, and joyous shall be their return for all shall drink water from the heavens and walk upon fields of green.”
the Scripture of Sefa
Freeday morning, 4-Week, 500 AF
Freeday dawns crisp and cold, the sky a pale blue gray like the sclera of an anemic eyeball.
Isako stands on the viewing platform of Easthatch watchtower with the hundred or so others who’ve come to see friends and loved ones on their way out of Tenacity. It’s crowded up here. Freeday morning is the best time for resignations. Gives everyone the rest of the day to sit with their feelings before the next week begins. Isako recognizes a lot of the people standing shoulder to shoulder by the railing, but they leave plenty of space around her. No one wants to get close to the reaper.
That’s fine by her. Even when you get to know the wagefolk, it’s better to keep a distance. Makes it easier on everyone during times like this.
She recognizes Loren’s daughter by her curly hair and the baby bulge. Tessa has people standing behind her and on either side of her, holding her hands. Isako thinks to go over and say something, but decides against it. This is a public moment, but also a private one. She’s not entitled to share in either their grief or pride.
Easthatch is the nicest of the cityhab’s gates, in Isako’s opinion. There’s too much shuttlecar traffic at Southhatch. The Purgatorist priests at Northhatch are notoriously pushy and will harangue anyone who passes to repent their sins. Westhatch is an awe-inspiring historical site, a monument of imposing black basalt inscribed with the names of the colony’s Founding Officers, next to a rock-slab memorial to the loss of Prosperity Cityhab. Grand but cold.
But Easthatch is serene. A circular public park leads to a simple wide stone boulevard lined with precious silver birch trees just starting to bud pale leaves. Quiet pilgrims sweep every inch of the path, and at the end of the walk, a marble statue of the Mother in Chains smiles down beatifically from atop a pedestal, blessing those passing and welcoming them into the Waiting. Isako isn’t a Sefan adherent, but she appreciates the gentle ambiance. When it’s her time to resign, she would want to come here.
The sun breaks over the western horizon. She turns toward it, breathes in deeply, drinks up the soft light on her face. She’s been doing as Greves suggested, taking some much-needed time off. She spent two days catching up on sleep, tidying her apartment, doing physio exercises for her knees. She wanted to visit the house, but Maya’s not free until tomorrow afternoon.
Whatever decisions are being made at higher levels about the remnants of Astrocom, she’s bound to find out sooner or later. There’s been nothing new from official Companynet channels; the nomination of Sandbar Uchi to the Board of Directors is still the leading story.
Uchi’s atier was Isako’s apprentice not so long ago. Waiting on the watchtower, she sends him a message. Martim, it’s been a while, but wanted to say congratulations. Huge achievement, to serve a soon-to-be Board member. Well deserved. Hope you’re still keeping up your longknife training. I know I owe you a get-together. When you have a moment, let me know when’s a good time.
She doesn’t expect a reply for a while. Martim’s future is unspooling long and bright ahead of him; hers is dimming and closing in like a narrowing tunnel. The men and women she’s trained are surpassing her. Had to happen; it was just a matter of time. She just didn’t think it would be quite so soon.
She turns back around to face the gates. Beyond the precious airshield that keeps heat and oxygen inside the cityhab, the Vastness stretches as far as the eye can see, a forbidding vista of hard-packed gravel underlain by permafrost. Glimmers of ice shine where a few centimeters of rare moisture collects between rocks. As cold as it gets in the poorer parts of Tenacity, it’s balmy compared with an average temperature outside of minus forty degrees centigrade. In the winter, drystorms scour the land with winds of over a hundred kilometers an hour.
When the Founders arrived in the Great Ships five hundred years ago, they gave the mercilessly cold and barren rock planet the name Aquilo, after the Roman god of winter.
Yet, as those on the watchtower can see from their high vantage point, the frozen tundra is not without life. With the onset of spring, desert lichen is blooming, carpeting the stark terrain in brownish-green patches that grow and spread with each passing year. In the short-lived weeks of summer, saxifrage and pearlwort will sprinkle the landscape with purple, yellow, and white. In recent years, hardy sedges and grasses have begun to flourish. Midges and weevils, the colonial vanguards of insect life, are being followed by flies and beetles. Stubborn, heartless old Father Aquilo is giving way, slowly but surely, to the Company’s enduring promise of a terraformed world.
Dotted here and there across the lichen and rock are clumps of bright blue.
On the roof of an office building across from the watchtower, one of Tenacity’s revolving billboards displays the Company’s KPIs and the latest news and public service announcements. Ambient oxygen: 12.576% +0.11… Atmospheric pressure: 55.6 kPa +0.003… Global average surface temperature: -38.2°C +0.09… Species introductions: 152 +7… Water prices to increase 2% beginning 500.6.1.0800… NorCon Ice advance to All-Division Cup finals… Do your part to warm the planet, switch to combustion today!…
“We’re getting closer all the time.” That’s what the Executive says every year during the annual address. Isako’s seen time-lapse photography of the area around Tenacity stretching all the way back to the Founding era, images that remind her of fungal growth under a microscope, seemingly primitive but infinitely complex, life tenaciously asserting itself. Visual proof of progress is dramatic when viewed across five centuries, but it’s built on a foundation of painstaking incremental gains.
Isako’s spent years advancing big-E objectives. She believed in Greves’s vision of reclaiming the stars, or more accurately, in Greves himself. But she understands why, for some, especially the devotedly Sefan little-Es, the promise of terraforming is sacrosanct. The possibility that Maya and future generations will live in a warmer, better world is what makes the forbidding Vastness seem like a beginning rather than an inevitable finale.
A stir goes through the witnesses on the platform as fourteen members of the Astrocom division arrive together, carried up the elevator after having been washed and dressed by the gatekeepers. Respectful applause greets them. Isako recognizes the faces of men and women to whom she’s recently delivered dismissal notices. Recent memories of all the tense, sad conversations collapse into a blurry montage, like the ribs of a closing fan.
She picks out Dew Loren, because he’s freshest in her mind. Loren strides with steady determination near the front of the group, leading his former colleagues in a procession of wagefolk wearing blue robes too vibrant to be seen anywhere in nature, their final parade a rich stain of color against the white boulevard and the gray Vastness.
A lump forms in Isako’s throat as the resignees pause at the airshield and turn back to wave to their watching friends and relatives. Tessa waves back harder than anyone, blowing kisses down to her father, eyes shining as tears stream down her cheeks.
Isako’s witnessed plenty of resignations over the years. They all bring her back to the first one she attended at the age of thirteen. Her kithfather didn’t look back at her that day; he didn’t even resign with a group. He went by himself on an ordinary midweek Monday afternoon when most people were working. Only six people, including Isako, were there to witness. Isthmus Akio was the best longknivesman in the Company, and when his last contract was over and his hands were too arthritic to draw the blade, he figured it was time.
“All things are easy with practice,” he told Isako. “Atiers practice dying, just like we practice sitting zanshin, just like we practice the quick draw. Resigning is nothing to be afraid of. The end is simply another part of life.”
Isako’s kithfather kept a mural of the Founding Officers of the Prosperity and Tenacity on his wall. They were great men and women of conviction, he said. When the fate of the colony hung on the thinnest of threads, they set an example of selflessness. They established the tradition of choosing to depart with dignity so vital resources would go toward the community’s survival. “What they did took courage, because they went first. They weren’t able to practice the way we do,” Akio told his kithdaughter. “We have the privilege of merely following in their footsteps.”
Something unexpected is happening near the airshield posts. Witnesses lean forward over the platform railing, murmuring in surprise. It takes Isako a disbelieving second to recognize the lone figure crossing the boulevard to meet Loren and the others.
It’s Forest Greves.
Isako jerks backward. What the hell is her client doing here?
He told her he wasn’t coming to watch. Otherwise, she’d have security measures in place, bodyguards and electronic monitoring well positioned. She and her longknife would be near him at all times. Greves is the reason two hundred people are out of work. Desperate freelancers, angry relatives, violent anti-Company agitators—any of them might take a run at him. Isako is personally responsible for her client’s safety and she’s up here on the watchtower too far away to do a damned thing.
“Shit,” she hisses under her breath. “Asshole. What does he think he’s doing?”
Greves reaches the group and starts shaking hands and speaking with people. He lays a hand on Dew Loren’s shoulder, claps another man on the back, smiles and says something to an old woman. His dark suit mills incongruously through the robes of bright blue.
Isako turns to push through the crowd and run for the stairs, but Greves’s voice stops her in her tracks.
“Citizens of Tenacity.” His amplified words ring out over the surrounding area.
Isako spins back around. How did he manage to get onto the AV network? Is he broadcasting across the whole cityhab? Without bothering to clear any of it by her first?
“Since the journey of our ancestors aboard the Great Ships, the Astrocommunications division has been a voice to the heavens.” The director steps away from the wagefolk and stands alone so that cityhab cameras will capture him defiant in front of the airshield posts.
“It doesn’t matter if space is silent. It doesn’t matter if our calls go unanswered. The Great Silence is our society’s test of faith. One day, it will end, and when it does, our descendants will judge us. They’ll ask: Did we continue to seek connection? Or did we retreat into isolation and fear? Were we bold dreamers or cynical cowards?”
Greves always was good at getting attention, and he’s certainly doing it now.
“Astrocommunications isn’t a large division, but we’ve always safeguarded a sacred link to our origins. We represent the hope for a future when we are not alone. For the division to be deprioritized and eliminated is for us to turn our backs on that hope. It’s a failure of foresight and judgment on the part of the Executive and the Board that I cannot—and will not—stand behind.
“As director of Astrocommunications, I resign in protest.”
Greves turns on his heel and strides for the airshield posts.
The fourteen former Astrocom workers surge after him, rushing for the end of Easthatch Boulevard as if they can’t wait to get there.
The Mother in Chains beams down on them as they pass.
Unseen sentries drop the first set of doors at the gate. The entire group passes into the transparent airlock that’s big enough to handle shuttlebuses and field cars and heavy equipment. They look small in there, like children walking through a vast and empty stadium. Greves doesn’t stop and doesn’t hesitate. He keeps walking, and his people follow.
Isako feels as if she’s trapped in a fucked-up dream.
Client service dictates that she should’ve either talked him out of this, or been down there with him. Instead, after nearly three decades of contract work, of being one of the very best atiers in the business, she’s failing. Publicly and spectacularly.
The airshield falls in front of the resignees. To those watching, it’s noticeable only as a momentary shimmer in the air, a visible distortion in the invisible barrier that contains and protects human life from the planet’s unforgiving conditions.
To those inside the airlock, it’s an instant precipitous drop in temperature and oxygen. Several of them sway and fall. Colleagues help them back to their feet. With effort, they keep walking, away from warmth and life, into the bleak Vastness. Blue robes flap in the subzero wind like the wings of a flock of colorful birds from some mythical tropic clime.
Forest Greves leads them onward.
The first man to collapse does so roughly six hundred meters from the airshield. He stumbles, stiff fingers clutching his chest, gasping for scant oxygen, shoulders heaving before going still. His colleagues pause only long enough to make the blessing sign of the Mother over him before continuing their trek across the black gravel.
“Thank you for your bequest.” A chorus of soft murmurs rises around Isako. She mouths the words reflexively, but her mind is spinning with senseless confusion and shame.
The resignees pass the desiccated, skeletal lumps of those who trod before them. Worn and faded bits of blue fabric cling to the dry corpses, temporary markers of their final resting places. Another woman falls and is left behind. “Thank you for your bequest.”
It’s rude to leave partway through, no matter when the person you came to support finishes their journey. So everyone stays the whole twenty-six minutes that it lasts. Applause rises when the remaining five people make it past the last visible bit of blue fabric on the tundra. They’ve gone farther than anyone else before them. The environment beyond the airshield is deadly, but less deadly than it was a year ago, ten years ago, a hundred or three hundred years ago. Each year, the cold abates a little, the oxygen rises a bit more. Everyone who takes the final walk is visible proof of progress.
The figures who’re still moving are difficult to see now, but Isako’s distance vision is still sharp. Dew Loren’s outlasted just about all the younger wagefolk, tough old coot that he is. Athletic genes or strong lungs maybe, or just an iron will. When he finally sits down, exhausted, he stretches out his legs, lies back, and looks up at the sky like he’s reclining across a picnic blanket on a sunny day.
“Fuck Earth,” Tessa cries out.
“Fuck Earth,” others shout in support.
Greves makes it another dozen impressive paces. When he can go no farther, he turns around to face Tenacity. With the dramatic showmanship he was known for all his career, he raises his arms in triumph, then kneels and falls forward, rests his forehead on the ground, and dies. He looks as if he’s bowing in supplication. Perhaps paying final respects to the colony that he strived to take to the stars, or maybe in subservience to his fate.
One day, they’ll build something important in his name.
When the cityhab expands all the way out to where Greves lies, his dry, mummified remains will be buried and memorialized at the spot he fell. Ordinary wagefolk like Dew Loren and the others might get a street or a business or even a school named after them. Directors often get a hospital or a university or a big public park. Greves wouldn’t care for that, Isako thinks blandly. He’d like to be entombed under a train station or a satellite tower, something slick and cool and high-tech, when he comes back under the airshield.
On the billboard across the boulevard, the KPI numbers and headlines disappear and are replaced by the smiling photographs and names of the resignees scrolling across the screen. In proud memory of esteemed colleagues who made way for others: Aloe Aditi, Canyon Truong, Crane Otto, Dew Loren…
The witnesses drift away, descending the watchtower, off to gatherings where they’ll remember their loved ones in private. Isako stays until she’s the only one remaining. She stares at the distant spot where Greves lies bowed on the Vastness but can’t wrap her mind around the idea of him being gone. She saw him just a few days ago, spoke to him about the future. Yes, he’d been upset at Astrocom’s demise and despairing of the Company’s direction, but he was a director. One of the elite, destined to live twice as long as regular folk. She never imagined him coming to such a drastic decision.
She’s crushed by what that means.
After twelve years of service, she didn’t really know her own client.
It’s been a long time since a director resigned in protest. The shocking news will reach the Executive in the Sweetsea. There’s going to be damage control, repercussions, public statements. Shifts in power. Pundits will make declarations on the Companynet. A huge blow for the reunionists and a great victory for the terraformists, they’ll say.
None of that’s Isako’s concern anymore. Her client’s gone to his death. At age fifty, she’s a contractor without a contract. A ronin.
What the fuck does she do now?
LIVE BY THE CODE. DIE BY THE KNIFE.
Isako is a legendary swordswoman, but every legend must come to an end. When her long-time client unexpectedly retires, she plans to follow—to walk out into the frozen wasteland of their planet with her head held high and her family enriched by her death. But when she’s offered a final mission, she can’t refuse, especially when she realizes who lies at the center of it all: Martim, her last—and worst—apprentice, who’s somehow made his way to the top. As she’s thrust into a world of corporate espionage and shadowy secrets, what she uncovers could forever change humanity’s existence among the stars.
The Last Contract of Isako is epic science fiction like only Fonda Lee can write it—set in a world where money trumps loyalty, the elite have the power to extend life or end it, and one woman in the twilight of her calling must decide what’s ultimately worth living—or dying—for.