DATE: Year 487-A, Sol 2

  LOCATION: Hotel Florida, Watch Pad (Europa)

  Poe hadn’t expected the explosion to be quite so dramatic. The goal had been to take out the landing pad at the top of the hotel, forcing all traffic in and out of the hotel through the ground tunnel out of the dome to the remote launch field. That was going to have been targeted next, at a later date. They expected the Saganites to finally send more support staff for the hotel, at the very least to increase the capacity of the ground tunnel. For years they’d promised to construct a new tunnel, maybe that would even happen.

  The explosion itself only separated a load-bearing column from the module that held the launch pad at the top of the hotel. Poe didn’t think the whole thing was going to topple over, or that the material he used would seep into the pipes and spread down several floors before blowing the walls up. It was a disaster.

  Poe wanted to think he’d been set up, but he knew the mistake was his, overestimating how much explosives he needed and underestimating how poorly kept up the hotel’s structure had been. He was not an explosives expert, just someone who had done demolition work in the mines. Nobody was really an expert at anything anymore. He’d lost his job at the mines after getting into a physical altercation with his supervisor. They sold his contract to an employment clearing house, whose representatives showed up in the middle of the sleep shift to collect him. They found collections during sleep shifts were a lot less confrontational than collections during work shifts.

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  It felt like an abduction to Poe. He’d heard about the employment clearing houses. A kind of end of the line for workers whose labor wasn’t skilled enough to earn them membership with a charter. Often, the clearing houses would lend out worker contracts to laboratories and medical facilities. Sometimes real labor was available, but it was rare and dangerous, the types of jobs that could not be automated and came at high risk of loss of life and limb. Deknotting the auxiliary wires of the Mars space elevator, for example, required hundreds of workers. The average worker made it a month before falling.

  Rarely, the jobs were dangerous and lucrative. Most of those weren’t legal but the clearing houses often looked the other way. The NEC didn’t care, they needed workers working, not milling about agitating and sowing disorder.

  Poe got picked up for one of those dangerous and lucrative jobs. He didn’t know it would make him a mass murderer.