Deadbeats: A Helix City Short Story

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Cody Jones owes the corp a lot of money. Decanted from a cryotube with a mountain of debt and very few options, she works corporate black ops in Downside—home to the gene-freaks, gangs, and dispossessed who don't have a place in the gleaming towers of Helix City.

Cody's latest job is simple: recover a fresh cache of cryogenically frozen citizens from a local gang before they're bartered to the highest bidder. Deliver them to Bellamy and knock a little more off her debt.

Pity the gangs have their own ideas about how this deal needs to go. What should be a simple recovery gig sees Cody and her partner caught in a conflict between the hulking kaiju-gangers and drug-addled zealots, and both sides have plans for the sleepers just might change Cody's world forever.

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About the author

Peter M. Ball

Peter M Ball is the author of more than fifty short stories and six novellas, along with essays, RPG material, articles, and poetry. His short stories and non-fiction have appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, Dragon Magazine, Writing Queensland, and Apex Magazine, and has been included in several Year’s Best anthologies. He’s previously taught creative writing at Griffith University and the Queensland Writers Centre, spent five years as the manager of the Australian Writers Marketplace, and convenes the biennial GenreCon writing conference in Brisbane, Australia.